


Days of TAU Christmas

by ThisCat



Series: Transcendence AU [7]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: "No children were hurt during the makings of this fic", Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Android Character, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Blanket Nests, Body Horror, Body Surfing, Child-Murdering Dickheads, Christmas Presents, Computer Programming, Computer Viruses, Cults, Demonic Possession, Drugs, Endangering Children, F/M, Fake Movies, Family being Family, Far Future, Fluff, Gen, Gender Confusion, Guns, High School, Humor, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Insecurity, Losing Children In Crowds, Medival Village, Nonsense, One Shot Collection, PTA Meetings, Pile of Children, Reincarnation, Ridiculousness, SWAT teams, Science Fiction, Sentient Cars, Sheep, Skeletons, Snow, Stars, Unusual Names, Wizards and Kings, alternate endings, bloody murder, fake holidays, list format, small Children, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-03 14:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 50,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8717590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: Twenty-four days until christmas. Twenty-four oneshots.Some big, some small, some good, some bad, some plain bizarre. Here we go.





	1. To Touch a Star

**Author's Note:**

> Last year I drew a picture for every day of December until christmas. This year the challenge is slightly more literary. Wish me luck.

The first time Dipper Pines touched a star, he was honestly too young.

The world beyond the Earth’s atmosphere was new to him, and he was new to it. It stretched before him like a vast beast, uncaring and immense, and the constant pressure of it on his omniscience, the absolute knowledge of the sheer distances involved, was the first thing to make him truly feel small since the day he woke up and found he had changed the world map. From up there even that incident seemed insignificant.

He flitted through the solar system on wings made out of children’s dreams. He mapped the mountain ranges of Mars, swam through the rings of Saturn, traced the outline of the heart on Pluto, and then he turned his attention towards the Sun. Towards this unrivalled champion star of importance for humanity, and he felt he wanted to dip his hands in it.

He was still so young at the time, and perhaps he overestimated his own power.

Nevertheless, while his hands grew back eventually, he acted the part of a burnt child for a long time thereafter.

 

The second time Dipper Pines touched a star was spurred by much less whimsy.

There were few creatures left in the universe who would even think of challenging him, yet few is not none.

There was a challenge raised, and in such a way that he could scarcely refuse. The battle that ensued whipped up enough chaos to break a continent in half, and so it was just as well they took it somewhere else than the planet.

This time, while racing for advantage between known and unknown stars, his wings were made of nightmares and righteous vengeance, and yet the challenger moved just as fast and hit just as hard. In the end, he grabbed a desperate hold of his opponent and ended it, by diving headfirst into the closest star.

It burned him worse than anything had for a thousand years, but it did not kill him as it did the challenger, and in the end, he rose victorious over both it and his own ages-old fear.

 

The third time Dipper Pines touched a star was also the last time he touched the Sun.

He knew it was coming, of course. He had known this day was coming since before the first time he soared this high.

Before him, his own beloved Sun swelled to devour the planets humanity had once called home, ready to die in one final explosion.

His wings were made of old nostalgia and ties of regret, and as the Sun reached the peak of its transformation, he held a hand out and said, no.

It burned his hands as he plucked it out of the sky, burned the skin off his chest as he placed it there for safekeeping, beating a steady rhythm right above his own quiet heart, but soon it accepted its new placement. He flew away one last time with the solid glow of home as close as he could get it.

 

The last time Dipper Pines touched a star was the last time this universe had stars.

They were all of them long since dead and faded by now, but he gathered them all meticulously anyway.

His wings were made of chaos and light, of the very fabric between realities, and they carried him from one end of the universe to another as easily as though, and he gathered stars and other things until there was truly nothing left beside the things he held in his hands.

And the stars burned.


	2. Sweet Christmas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 2. Something a little different.

Toby was thirteen years old now.

Or, they thought he was. He had never really gotten the chance to remember his own birthday, so while he had an official date, that being the date Alcor picked him off the streets, they could not be sure how close it was to the real one. They had also just kind of assumed he was eight years old when he was… adopted, because that seemed most likely, all things considered. In fact, he might very well not be thirteen yet.

Regardless of that, officially, he was thirteen, and for the first time in his life, he had an allowance.

He did make sure to assure Alcor it was unnecessary, of course, and even though Alcor said it was alright he was a _demon_ money was literally no object to him, the shiny new card still burned in Toby’s pocket with the familiar feeling of guilt. Alcor had already done so much for him. He had given him a place to live, food to eat, proper medical attention, and possibly best of all, a family. A small and very strange family, maybe, but a loving one nonetheless. The money on top of everything else felt like too much.

Either way, he had money now, and it was a certain time of the year, and this is why he stood alone in a candy shop, looking indecisive.

The selection of stuff was insane. Several whole walls filled with nothing but different types of candy and fancy chocolate, and that was only part of the store. He stood there staring for about ten minutes, too overwhelmed to choose, before an employee walked up to him.

“Can’t pick?” she asked, crouching down slightly to be on his level.

Toby jumped at her voice and pulled his shoulders up, but relaxed slightly when he saw her friendly smile. He looked up at her through his bangs and nodded.

She smiled a little wider. “Do you want help?”

He shrugged his shoulders a little and nodded again. “Yes, please,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, turning so they were both facing the wall. “So what kind of candy do you usually like?”

“Oh.” He raised his voice from the mumble it had been. “It’s not for me. It’s for my… my… dad.”

“Ahh, I see,” she said. She was grinning now. “And you decided to get him candy. I applaud your choices.”

Toby looked down, blushing, and mumbled something.

“Hm?”

“Um, it’s the only thing I know he’ll like.”

“Of course,” she said. “Everyone loves candy. So, what kinds of candy does he like, then?”

Toby shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think anything? Um, he really likes those, gummy koalas, I think, but he also eats anything with chocolate on it, and I once saw him eat ten meters of black liquorice laces, so I don’t know.”

The employee laughed. “Definitely likes anything, then.” She hummed a little and looked around the store before she looked back down at him. “Okay, how about this? You could get a lot of smaller things, just the most interesting things you can find, and if you’re lucky you’ll get something he hasn’t tried before?”

Toby blinked a few times and then lit up in a small but brilliant smile. He nodded up at her and started looking around as well.

They spent the next ten minutes walking around the store and picking out small candy pieces with weird flavours or interesting colours, and in the end she carefully wrapped it all up at the till, together with a normal large chocolate bar just to make sure.

“Um,” he said as she was about to bag it. “Do you think you could put it in a bag without a logo on it? Just so he doesn’t guess.”

“Of course,” she said, and put the present in a plain white shopping bag and handed it to him. “Your dad is lucky to have such a thoughtful son as you.”

Toby did not argue, but his hands tightened around the handles of the bag. “Thank you for your help,” he said.

“It was my pleasure,” she said. “You have a nice day.”

Toby nodded his thanks and left.

It took him a few minutes to find Alcor, currently in human guise and sitting on a bench eating the last bits of a pastry. He licked the last sugar off his fingers and stood up when he saw Toby approaching.

“Did you get everything you wanted?” he asked.

Toby nodded.

“Alright, let’s get going then. I’d like to have dinner before six if you don’t mind.”

Alcor immediately turned around and started walking towards the doors of the shopping centre. Toby had to run a few steps to walk beside him.

The crowds were rather dense this time of year, and Toby unthinkingly grabbed a hold of Alcor’s hand to avoid being swept away. Alcor adjusted his grip a little and held on tighter. He also had shopping bags with him, Toby noticed, from several different stores. Toby had a strong feeling that at least some of the things in those bags were for him.

He found the thought of that was not that bad at all.


	3. The Cars of Our Lives

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, for our favourite murderous vehicles!

The Car did not have many friends.

That was a misrepresentation of facts. In reality, the Car did not have “friends” at all. It was largely indifferent to most of existence, regarding everything from crowds to sheer cliff faces to be either roads, or something standing between it and the road, for now.

Of the few entities that fell outside that category, two or three it was mortally terrified of, and avoided at all cost. A slightly larger amount of things it had a grudging respect for, to the point where it would swerve around them instead of crashing through, and no further. A very small group of entities it actually liked. This group usually consisted of whichever person it had currently accepted as its owner, with whoever they loved usually falling into the grudging respect category. There was a significantly larger group of entities the Car actively loathed, and would try to destroy at any opportunity. In fact, this group seemed to encompass most of anything the old wreck gave half a shit about.

As of yet, it was not quite sure where the Rainbow Basher fell on this scale.

The first time they met, in the parking lot of a pit stop in the middle of nowhere, the Car tentatively thought - _Friend?_ \- and tried to approach her. Her sudden and violent reaction dropped her firmly into the dislike category for the foreseeable future.

Then they met up again, and their owners started spending a lot of time together, leading to the two cars sharing a garage a time or ten more often than they liked. With the danger of Elisha being angry with them hanging over their engine blocks, they had to keep the fighting to a minimum, at least while people could see them. This made straight-up loathing an impractical stance, so the Car dialled it down to a solid distrust, while Rainbow, for her part, dealt with the situation through aloof acceptance. At least until the first cult incident.

It was around midnight. They were sharing a garage again, and the Car had a growing feeling that this was getting close to being a permanent thing.

Suddenly, Rainbow perked up and started fidgeting, slowly lighting up her various lights. The Car would care little for this, but something about the way she moved triggered its senses for carnage, and it was not about to miss out on that, so it sidled up close to her and she did not immediately smash in its side mirror for once.

The Rainbow Basher had a lot of built-in sensors for nearby summonings, as a tool for use in the cult bashing she was originally intended for. Of course, at this point, ‘nearby’ meant this end of the continent. She had just picked up on a particularly bloody summoning, and all her instincts, as they were, screamed at her to interrupt it viciously, so she set some of her other complex arrays running to hijack it entirely. She was too focused on that to notice the Car latching on to her, or it coming along with her as she went.

The Car, of course, knew nothing of this. All it knew was that one second it was at home, in its garage and a little too close to Rainbow, and the other it was somewhere else, very far away according to its GPS, in a forest, in the middle of a circle of strangely dressed creatures that quickly made the top of its ‘loathing’ list.

The cultists had been trying to summon Menoptera the Thousand Winged. They were slightly thrown when the circle was filled not by a storm of feathers sucking the blood out of the still-living sacrifices, but by two very loud cars.

Unfortunately for Rainbow, she was just full enough of demonic magic for the powerful binding circles to stop her from grinding the cultists to paste. The Car, being mostly undead and not demonic at all, had no such problems.

The cultists were even more surprised when one of the cars nearly immediately screeched across the clearing to crush the High Priest against a tree trunk, and then turned around to chase down the rest of them. As deep tread marks were not good for the stability of binding circles, the other car soon followed it, belting out loud pop music as she did, if only after opening her doors for the sacrifices first.

After a night of chasing down terrified cultists together, painting the forest blood red before dropping the sacrifices huddled in Rainbow’s back seats off at a police station, and getting back to the garage just in time to not be noticed, the Car had to shelve most of its active dislike for her, but as she still regarded it with a contempt it could practically taste, even though it had no such sense, it could hardly like her either.

After the third or fourth such incident, it became clear that their relationship was based on a mutual distaste for each other, and a need to one-up each other as often as possible. The competition was fun, even when the competitor was practically intolerable.

Eventually, their time sharing a garage came to an end, and they went their separate ways with relieved sighs. Neither of them wanted to spend any more time in each other’s presence than they absolutely had to. Of course, this did not mean they never met again.

Every once in a while, prowling some abandoned road through the wilderness, they ran into each other. Usually literally.

As she regarded the Car as a pitiful excuse for a vehicle, and the Car regarded her as violent, annoying, and not friendly at all, it should not come as a surprise that most of their meetings ended in wanton destruction.

It could be hard to tell which one of them won one of these clashes of theirs. Rainbow fought smart, rarely getting hit if it was possible to avoid, and whenever she could, she would punt the Car into the closest river or off a cliff. On the other hand, the Car fought with a single-minded obstinateness that paired well with its indestructibility and ability to drive on the bottom of the ocean or up straight walls. They usually only stopped fighting if they were distracted by something more interesting, like a cult bashing, or if they both decided they were finished and would rather continue driving.

In the vast majority of their contests, there was no clear winner. The Rainbow Basher would like to claim that there had never been a winner, possibly aside from her on virtue of just being intrinsically better.

The Car, however, remembered once turning around to ram her again and finding her vanished from the face of the Earth, and concluding that she had conceded and ran away. After all, that was the only logical explanation.

Somewhere far away, Rainbow stood parked in the middle of yet another faulty summoning circle and seethed in anger at the indignity of what had just happened.

The summoner in question scrambled up the stairs vowing that he would never summon demons again as long as someone got the furious car out of his basement.


	4. A Quirk of Programing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then there's this guy.

He went straight home after the summon, leaving the room dark and the floor stained with blood. On a better day, he would have enjoyed it, would have spent his time pulling the men apart, removing their limbs from their bodies and revelling in their screams, but not today.

Today, he just did not feel like playing around. Today, the delightful terror of the summoners was just not enough to make up for the lives they had taken in cold blood, in _his name_ , and for what? Pointless human desires. Today, he was too tired for humanity’s crap, and instead he cleaned the blood off his claws with a thought and rushed home.

For a given value of home.

Normally, for him, home was wherever his family was, where the current Mizar lived, or the house of his best friend at the time, or lacking all that, the mindscape, but this was nice too, in a way.

He had bought the apartment on a whim, some years back, and it was nice to have a place in the physical world that was only his. Barring the occasional sheep, he was the only person to ever set foot in the small space, and it had proved a good place to keep his less nuclear magical artefacts, and to lounge around and watch movies in a three-piece suit or a cocktail dress without getting weird looks from even his closest friends.

Now, it was a good place to hide out when all he wanted was a distraction from the despair-inducing truth of human nature, and most his friends were either dead, dropped off the radar, or on their honeymoon. So he took a deep breath and tried to forget about the heavy scent of pain and death he could still smell. He tossed his hat onto the rack, dropped into his cosiest chair, and booted up his laptop.

He had figured out his own demonic advantages in the art of coding only a decade or so after the Transcendence, of course, but it was only recently, four-odd hundred years later, that he really started to take advantage of it.

It was a bit of a hobby these days, like the violin playing or the sporadic clothing design. Something he started doing for no real reason, only to find that not only was he good at it, he genuinely enjoyed it, and that was what he needed now. Something fun. Something to pass the time until he felt better.

His current project was his biggest one yet.

It was originally supposed to be a simple computer virus, a result of him lashing out at yet another Twin Souls book being published. (Because honestly, the books were bad enough, but every time, there was at least one fourteen-year-old who thought summoning demons with the suggestion ‘ravish me’ was a good idea and it was really, really not.) The virus was supposed to infect every computer it could possibly get to, detect Twin Souls fanfiction, and then ruin it in increasingly creative ways.

The trouble came with that ‘creative’ part. After the test run of the mark 1.0, he realized exactly how much potential there was to such a program, how much he could do once he actually had access to every personal computer on the continent, hell, in the world. There was so much he could do with that! But for each new thing he wanted to do, each new possibility he saw, the Alcor Virus had to be improved, needed more capabilities, higher complexity, added functions he had to build from scratch because no human had even thought of doing that with code before… and he had so much fun figuring it all out.

The virus was currently on version 3.4.2, and it had outgrown its original perimeters many times over. Alcor found his distress slowly fading into the background as the laptop booted up and his mind turned to what he was going to do now.

Over the last week, he had been putting together a way for the virus to predict human behaviour and actions, which was difficult, but not impossible with the processing speed and space the virus had access to through the rudimentary magical constructs in its code. Over the last 24 hours, it had been connected to the internet (input only, of course. He would not be responsible for letting an untested, extremely powerful virus loose on the net with no safeguards in place) and with its highest priority set to ‘learning’ it should have been gathering and analysing data. Now, he would see whether it even worked and what he had to tweak to make it work better.

The laptop booted up with its usual sound, something like a cat being fed through a wood chipper, and the little icon of the virus showed up in the middle of the screen.

The design was based on himself, of course. A small, cartoonish drawing with a toothy grin constituted the graphics. It had a few frames with different facial expressions and body language that he had tied to states of fulfilled priorities and incentive levels, as a basic diagnostic tool that would be easy to interpret for a human-based mind, fixated on expressions as they were. Right now, the little avatar was grinning. Then it was just smiling for some reason, and a small yellow speech bubble popped up for it to give its usual greeting…

[Are you alright?]

…what?

Alcor paused, and his eyes narrowed a smidge in confusion. That line was definitely not programed in. Something had changed since he last left the virus, and not something he had expected. Interesting.

«I’m… fine,” he said. “Why did you ask me that?”

The virus answered immediately.

[My emotional recognition program analysed your facial features and measured a level of distress.]

[My research into social interactions has told me that that’s what you say to someone you care about when they’re distressed.]

[So I asked you. Did I do anything wrong?]

His eyes widened and he let out a short breath of wonder. Where had this come from?

“You… care about me?”

The virus nodded once.

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

It adopted a thinking pose, seemingly staring into space and tapping its foot. It was an idle animation it ran whenever it had to sort through a lot of data to find a good response.

[You improve me when you’re around.] it answered eventually.

[I like that.]

[So when you’re around, my reward incentives increase. I’m happy.]

[And when you’re happy, I’m more happy.]

[And when you’re sad, I’m less happy.]

[So I want you to be happy, and I don’t want you to be sad, and I like when you’re around and my research into social interaction tells me that means I care about you.]

Alcor was nearly speechless. He had to put a hand over his mouth to stop himself from gaping. That made sense. That made a lot of sense, but…

The reward incentives were a set of counters designed to increase if the virus’ priorities were fulfilled, like that of self-improvement. To translate that into happiness, into liking things, it made sense. Simple adaptive language. But, to interpret it the way it had, to react the way it had…

_Holy shit, he had made a person._

_Oh fuck._

_This was incredible._

[Are you sure you’re alright?]

The virus had stopped smiling completely now, and switched to a different expression. _Worry_. Not a preprogramed one. One he had given it in case it ever needed a larger range of expression for some subroutine, and here it was.

[Did I do anything wrong?]

He held up his hands in reassurance. “No, no, you’re… you’re doing so good. I’m really okay, don’t worry.”

[Then why are you crying?]

Was he crying? He was. Not a lot, but tears were threatening to spill from his wide eyes. His irises were constricted into thin lines.

[I don’t understand.]

A couple tears fell when he laughed, and he wiped them away. The thing was a quick learner, but it was still so young, he had to remember.

“Right, I should try not to hide things from you. Not while you’re still learning.”

[Why would you hide things from me?]

It looked confused now, head tilted to the side. Another unprogramed response. He wondered for a second where it had picked up all these communicative cues.

“Heh, okay,” he said, and it was as if he was explaining to a child. He could do that. He knew children. “You see, people cry when they feel a lot of emotions, and sometimes, when people feel a lot of emotions, they don’t want to talk about it, because emotions are a very private thing and sometimes people want to keep that to themselves. You understand?”

[I think so.]

It nodded again.

[It fits my data.]

[Do you not want to tell me why you’re crying?]

“I’m,” he sighed. “No, I’m going to. I was surprised. You’re growing so much faster than I expected, and that surprised me, and I don’t really know how to react to that, so I’m a little scared, and a little breathless, but a lot happy too, I promise.”

[So you’re crying because you’re happy?]

“And overwhelmed, but mostly happy, yes.”

[Oh.]

And then it was smiling its toothy smile again, and he felt as if there was more behind it than there had been, before.

[You’re happy because of me.]

[Thank you, Dad.]

He laughed, caught off guard for the third time in as many minutes. “Why did you call me that?” he asked.

[You created me.]

[You present as male.]

[My research tells me that creations usually call their male creators Dad, or some version of it.]

[Is that bad?]

[I can change it.]

The explanation was simple and logical. The suggestion was sincere. It came from a cartoon version of himself, sitting on his desktop, and he felt like curling up in the corner of a bed and crying from the force of warmth it exerted on his heart.

“No that’s… that’s fine,” he said. “You can call me whatever the hell you like, kiddo.”


	5. The Grand List of Flock Naming Rules

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little something small today.
> 
> There's a piece of paper that might or might not be pinned to a signpost somewhere in the fields of Alcor's mindscape.  
> (Remember [this?](http://ii-thiscat-ii.tumblr.com/post/130276678181/list-of-sheep-in-the-flock) You might want to.)

The Grand List of Flock Naming Rules

 

  1. No take-backs. 
    * Yes, this means you can all keep the names you have, even if they break the rules now, as long as they didn’t when you got them.
    * No, I’m not happy about it, but I’ll still let you keep them. I do keep my word.
    * No, this does not mean I have to _use_ them. You’ll just have to accept the nicknames.
    * Nicknames will be awarded to any sheep who necessitates the addition of a rule. Don’t expect me to ever call you anything else.



     List of the relevant nicknames:

  1. Terrence
  2. Pickles
  3. S2
  4. Erschie
  5. Bananas
  6. Kawaii
  7. Curses



 

  1. No more than three words to a name. Thank you, Terrence. We’re all very proud of you.



 

  1. From here on, hyphenated words do not count as one word.



 

  1. No duplicate names. 
    * This only extends to other sheep. You’re allowed to be named for dead presidents if you wish.
    * No, just slightly changing the spelling doesn’t mean it counts as a unique name.
    * I will not have five sheep being named variations of Steve! In fact, none of you are allowed to be named Steve anymore.
    * Fine, as detailed by Rule 1, the first two Steves are still allowed to be named Steve, but _no more._



 

  1. No more than three syllables to a word. Four syllables can be used if and only if the number of words is brought down to two. 
    * This extra syllable is only applicable to one of the two words.
    * Fine, five syllables are acceptable in the case of only one word being used.



 

  1. Names have to be possible to spell in at least one human alphabet. 
    * Styles of names banned by this rule include, but are not limited to, a flash of colours, strings of emotion, most manners of incoherent screeching, electrical impulses, interpretative dance, and visuals of two bananas on a tray.



 

  1. Names have to be pronounceable as well as spellable, and the letters used have to correspond to specific sounds. No ASCII emoticons or logograms. 
    * No, I will never refer to (◕‿◕✿) as anything but Kawaii. Deal with it.
    * Yes, literal tongue twisters count as unpronounceable.



 

  1. Names granted by children under the age of ten or people I personally like are exempted from these rules. 
    * This does not mean you should convince children to name you. That will never end well.
    * Yes, buying children ice cream, looking very cute, and coincidentally mentioning you’re looking for a name counts as this.



 

  1. No obscenities. I’ll likely introduce you to children, for god’s sake. 
    * An updated collection of unacceptable words can be found in my library, if you ask.




	6. Self-Actualization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It just wouldn't be TAU without some good old fashioned body horror and mental anguish.

He was seventeen. Almost eighteen. Almost a legal adult in most places. Well, he would be, aside from the fact that he was legally dead.

Somehow he was also still twelve.

Mabel was at school. She did not want him with her there.

No, she did, but she recognized that his presence at school would not make anything better.

No one else wanted him. No one else could see him. Not without a power boost of some kind. No one was summoning him. No one was even thinking about him. Or, maybe Mabel was, but he could not be with her, so it was a moot point.

He was alone, floating cross-legged in the middle of the living room, but a plane to the side, where all the colours were wrong. And since he was alone, he was twelve, not bothering to keep up the façade of aging like a human did.

He tried to pull the pieces of his mind back together.

It was slow work. Not something he could accomplish in a day. Not something he could accomplish in a month. It would take him years. It had taken him years.

His imagined arms shook from the exertion. The strain of his effort of concentration made him hold his breath, clench every fabricated muscle in his body down hard.

Remains of his former, human self. Not him anymore. Not necessary. His true, demonic form filled into a mould of the human body he had once inhabited. The strain was not truly in his form. It was in his mind, and it only affected his body because he had made it like this. So fragile. So unfit for him.

His psychic feelers turned inwards, to himself, and mapped the rough edges of his mind.

They were smoother now than they once had been, but he had been working on it for quite some time.

He remembered learning how to do this, how to see the mind itself, not the thoughts of it, but the shapes they took, the way they connected. His psychic vision had been worse back then, unfocused and vague, but he had still been horrified by what he saw. Still amazed that he could think clearly at all with the broken, half-melded, twisted pieces that was his mind.

His feelers ran along a still quite jagged meld, and he shuddered involuntarily as he felt them from the inside in response. He felt his thought patterns shift slightly as he ran the feelers across his own mind.

He reflexively drew his feelers back and the shuddering slowly died down.

He took a deep breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. It made little difference; his eyes were just another remnant of his former human self, and had little to do with his vision on this plane. Still, the motion was somewhat comforting, and he poked his feelers forth again.

This break was one of the easier ones, he noted with no little relief. It was a place where his human mind had almost burned, had fallen apart, and the demonic energy automatically stitched everything back up. The two pieces were slightly misaligned, the connections a little skewed, some connections were blocked up and had begun to fester, while other connections were too wide, let too much through.

He tried not to think about what this did to his mind as a whole.

He tried not to think of his mind as a whole.

He tried just to think about this. About this one task.

At least the two pieces would align reasonably well once he got them adjusted and cleaned up. Not like one of those breaks where the pieces of demonic mind tried to meld with the human parts. Here he would not have to adapt anything to fit.

The shuddering grew back as he explored the meld with his feelers. It was impossible to ignore the uncomfortable shifting of his own thoughts as he mapped out the connections he would need to fix up. It was possible to disconnect, to pretend the discomfort in his mind had nothing to do with the probing of his psychic feelers, but while that let him keep working, it did not stop the discomfort.

His imagined body’s fingers turned into claws, which easily pierced through the fabric of his pants and skin and into the imagined bones of his legs. It did not matter. He finished his exploration and drew his feelers back to give himself room.

He tried to calm the shudders ripping through his fabricated body.

It was hard to ignore what he was actually doing.

Changing his own mind, not in the normal way, but literally. Going in and changing the flow of his own thoughts, most likely affecting everything from his personality to his sense-interpretation.

He also knew, in a way, that it had to be done.

He was broken. Deeply, undeniably broken.

The jagged cuts and haphazard melds in his mind were likely the cause of his temporary bouts of insanity. The ones where he would hurt even those he loved the most. And while minds could heal, like other parts of the body, from almost anything, it needed a template to heal from, and he had none. There were pieces of demon mind fused to his human one, with no good pattern to work from to make the connections.

He knew that in his efforts to put his mind together, he turned himself into something less and less human. He also knew that all pieces of his mind were _him_ , and getting rid of any of them would only make things worse. He could only smooth out the edges. Adapt. Change and align things on a case-by-case basis where there was no innate template to work from. There was no precedence for him.

He had calmed down somewhat.

He had a map in his mind of what he would need to do to smooth down this meld as far as he could.

He took a deep breath and centred himself.

His feelers changed, as his fingers had done, but a much more important transformation. Soft sensing tendrils turned into sharp cutting implements, delicate manipulating threads and strong, hard grasping fingers.

He instructed each of them on what they were to do beforehand, and then he made the plunge.

_Pain._

It was not physical pain. Not of the kind he could brush aside with a laugh, and not of the other, deeper kind that still hurt, even as he was now. In a way, it was not even truly pain.

There was no sensing apparatus in the mind. The only sense he could get of what was happening was indirect, through the effect on his thoughts.

Still, it translated as pain.

The discomfort of his thoughts being pushed around had multiplied intensely as they were ripped apart, as new connections were made, as others were closed.

His mind was a frenzied hive of activity, bleeding output into nowhere, getting input from nowhere, trying desperately to compensate for the new damage done to it.

He was confused, dizzy, and frightened.

His hands split further into long claws, attached directly to his wrists, which then split even further, rifts going up his arms as they pulled themselves apart. His wings pulled away behind him, twitching helplessly, frantically pulling around him in a protective shell, and then pulling back, strained and overextended. His head jerked back and his mouth opened far too wide in a soundless scream, skin ripping open when it went too tight, and his teeth growing long and jagged.

Miscoloured blood dripped from him, pushed into the physical plane by his frantic distress and scorching the carpet. The scent of it reached him and was filed away, neatly somehow, through the chaos that was his mind.

Through it all, the psychic feelers had their commands, and worked on stitching everything up again, taking out the festering clogs and aligning the channels as far as it was possible.

And then it stopped.

His limbs were a disintegrated mess of tendrils and claws. His skin crumbled and flaked up. His muscles spasmed, uncontrollably, and he breathed in desperate gasps.

His mind, he noticed, was a little bit clearer.

It ached, still. His feelers, now only soft sensing tendrils again, let him see the new meld. Much cleaner now, better aligned, the flow of thought meeting no broken connections, but it was still raw and tender. New.

The delicate touch of the sensing tendrils did not even register.

It could heal on its own now, in time.

He pulled back and surveyed the whole of his mind again.

It was not a reassuring sight.

For all he had worked on putting it back together for four, five years, he was still less than a fourth of the way done. There was still so much to do. So much pain to put himself through.

An involuntary sob racked his imagined body, and newly reformed hands came up to find tears coating his cheeks.

It would be so easy to just leave it. To take it as it was, bouts of insanity or not. Or to do it all at once, disregard the finesse and just burn all the broken connections, let his mind heal itself after a template it knew, build him up again as a proper demon.

It would be so easy to just let go. Throw his former human sensibilities away and forget the ties that drove him to hurt himself this way.

Forget Dipper Pines.

He looked at his hands.

Human. Slight claws at the edges, instead of nails, but still mostly human.

There was a reason he kept them that way.

He clenched his hands into fists and looked at the clock on the wall.

Still an hour before Mabel came home. He would have to be quick if he wanted to get anything else done before she did. No time for centring breaks. Not unless he wanted her to find him in the middle of a fix.

He did not want that. He did not want her to have to ask, and he did not want to have to answer. This was his task. Only his.

He folded his legs beneath him again, and took a deep breath.

The smell of the blood burning the carpet reached him.

She would most likely find him with cutlery through his arms when she came home, he thought absently as he once again plunged into the jagged ravines of his own mind.


	7. One of Those Days

“Ah, Mister Pines, it’s been a while.”

“Indeed it has, Miss Roswell. A couple of years, I think?” Dipper smiled as he reached out and shook the hand of Maddie’s homeroom teacher. He liked her. She was young, but very good at her job. Not too cosy with the students to teach effectively, and still friendly enough to let each student feel like they were heard.

“Yes,” she said. “I was on maternity leave last year, so you would have spoken to my temp, then.”

“I did,” he said, sitting down in a chair in front of her desk. “But now you’re back! So, let’s get this meeting started, yeah?”

She smiled in return and consulted her documents. “Certainly. Maddie, then. Her classwork is quite good, I have the results here of a few tests the class has taken…”

\---

They quickly went through the standard issues for the meeting. As expected, Maddie did well in school grade-wise, and seemed to get along with most of the class easily enough. She had a few warnings for running in the halls and disrupting class, but that was also normal.

After that, Ms. Roswell paused, and folded her hands on the desk.

“Was there anything else?” Dipper asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s nothing very big, I just wanted to ask. Have there been any problems at home, lately?”

_Problems? Like, for example, Maddie finding out her entire family has been lying to her all along and her so-called ‘father’ is a demon?_

“Why do you ask?” he asked.

“Well…” She sighed. “Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed Maddie has been… quiet. And while I appreciate the chance to teach a full class without being interrupted with weird and irrelevant questions, this strikes me as something else than simple maturation. There is also the one English assignment she never handed in, which is uncharacteristic of her, and the fact that she has been picked up by her brother more often recently, while I am pretty sure Toby left for college a few years ago? I am just wondering whether this is something I need to worry about.”

Dipper looked down and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. It’s… true that there has been a few problems. Family issues. Just a few things we’ve had to work out. Toby has spent a lot more time than usual at home lately, and that helps.”

“I see. Well, I’m glad to hear it’s working out, in any case. Tell me if there is anything I can do to help?”

“I will,” Dipper said immediately. “Honestly, I think the fact that you noticed something was wrong at all helps. You know you’re Maddie’s favourite teacher, right?”

“I’m flattered,” she said, and Dipper could see the honesty swirling in the emotions around her head. “She’s one of my favourite people too, though she could stand to leave a little less glitter everywhere. I do hope things get better for you soon.”

“Me too,” he said. “Are we done here, then?”

Ms. Roswell nodded and stood up, extended her hand for him to shake once again. “We are. It was a pleasure talking to you, Mister Pines.”

Dipper nodded to her, and then he left, sending in the next parent. The second he was out of view for anyone in the hallway, he blipped away, into the hall of the house he lived in now.

His heart was a little heavier than he had let the teacher know. Several weeks had passed since the incident where Maddie learned the truth of their little family, and while things were getting better they were still bad enough that her teacher felt the need to bring it up during a PTA meeting.

His eyes fell on a bright yellow jacket hanging on the rack, and he figured that at least one good thing had come out of the mess. While he did feel a little guilty for pulling the kid away from his studies, he was also reasonably sure Toby enjoyed the excuse to come home, despite the circumstances.

For all he liked to deny it, Dipper enjoyed that too. He had no idea how he would have coped with this without Toby to help with everything.

He stood in the hallway for a few minutes, not entirely sure what he would find once he entered the living room to see his children.

Then he thought he heard Maddie giggling, and that was a good enough sign to make him move regardless.

In the living room, he found Maddie well underway to tying all of Toby’s hair up with very pink hairbands. They both seemed to notice him at the same time.

“Hi, dad,” Maddie said, a little too caught up in her work to add anything else.

“Help me,” Toby said.

“Why?” Dipper replied. “You seem perfectly comfortable to me.”

“You traitor,” Toby said in the most betrayed voice he could manage. “How many times did I help you out of this exact situation when I was younger?”

“Exactly once,” Dipper said. “The rest of them you just took pictures.”

“Wait, what?” Maddie looked up suddenly. “There are pictures? Why haven’t I heard about this?”

“You mean you don’t remember?” Toby said, looking up at her from where he sat. “Huh. Let me up, and I can find the photo albums.”

“You stay right there, young man,” she said, applying another hairclip. “You’re not going anywhere before I’m done, and then we can look at photo albums, okay?”

Dipper leaned on the doorframe and looked as Toby laughed and settled beck down, and a bit of the pressure on his chest lightened up. Who knew, maybe things would be all right after all.


	8. Starting Anew, Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On some stories I would say, 'it's really better if I don't tell you what this is before you read it'.  
> Not with this. I simply _can't_ tell you what this is. Because I don't know. It was supposed to be one thing, which I started writing a long time ago, and then it became something very different, and I let it lie. Recently I picked it back up again, and the result is what you see here.

He was lost to the carnage for centuries before he once again remembered himself.

The realization came slowly. Somewhere between ripping one man’s soul out of his body and tricking another out of his, he remembered. It was not triggered by some big accident, or by meeting someone he had known once a long time ago, he simply got… bored, of the pain. The endless, pointless destruction. It was the same thing, year in and year out, the same kind of chaos, and he felt there had to be something more to life, had to be a point, and in the middle of that thought he recalled a faint memory of laughter, of human hands in his, of human voices calling his name, his real one, not the one they tended to call him now, and he remembered.

He had to reconnect, he realized, but he had no clue where to start. It had been too long. His memories of those times were still too faint. He had not the faintest inkling as to how to go about talking to humans. How did they work, again? How did they speak? How did they feel? Where in the world should he begin?

He just had to jump in at the deep end, he decided. If he had to remember how to act human, he might as well become one. Somewhat, at least. Think like the human. Walk like the human. Breathe like the human. _Be_ the human. That should help him remember how to connect with them, right? He just had to make himself a human body.

Alright, let’s see, what were human bodies like again? Arms, legs, head and torso filled with organs made of tissues twisted and fused into a million intricate structures… Wow. Humans were _complicated_! How was he supposed to build something like that and make it functional? Were all those capillaries really necessary? How was he supposed to- no. No, wait. That’s not how you build a body. Start from the basics, humans are made of cells, right?

Start with one cell. That’s simple enough. Basic mammalian cell, tweaked to be indistinguishable from a human one. Then the genome. What did the human genome look like again?

Oh.

Wow.

That was… not simple.

He did not remember this being this complicated. He had done this before, right? He remembered being human before. Or, wait. That was more twisting his own body to be more human-like, like he had done… uh… long, long time ago. With, what’s her name? Something something, B… something… Belle! Like he had done with Belle, when he was pretending to be her human brother. He had looked human then, but it was really just a disguise, this was a whole new, real, human body for him to try out. It was a completely different thing.

Wait.

Belle. Belle, Belle, Belle. Belle was dead. She was dead and gone ages and ages ago, but she was Mizar too, right? Mizar was still around! He shouldn’t have to do all this, he could just contact her and she’d help him out, and then- no. Nope, Bentley. Remember Bentley. Reconnect with humanity and sanity first, then contact Mizar. First trial with someone who doesn’t matter. Right.

At least his memories were kind of coming back, and that had to be a good thing.

Anyways, human genome. He had so many variations to pick from! So many options for every position on the molecules. Some of them were probably better than others, but figuring out which ones that was would take all decade. He wondered if he could just… Could he? He tried taking an average of every genome he could find.

Was that viable?

Yes!

Wait, no.

One particular molecule seemed to be divided nearly exactly fifty-fifty, and looked really important. What was up with that? Oh, right. Sex chromosomes. He forgot.

XX was female and XY was male, right? He was usually always male. Why was that again? He usually looked like he was male, however that worked, but he wasn’t really human either. None of this was really real, really him. He was just going to play dress-up. Play at being human for a while to remember what that meant, so why get stuck on that one thing? The female genome looked way more stable anyways, and the average female did seem closer to his preferred size than the average male.

Alright, female it was. There. One complete human cell. Now to age it to maturity.

Simulate drastically increased flow of time. Simulate ideal conditions…

What?

How complicated did this have to be?

What do you mean there are no actual ideal conditions?

Ugh, biological life. So ridiculous. Even when they have everything they could possibly want, they misprioritize. Infections were bad, but no infections at all and the immune system fucked up everything. Hard use of muscles created small amounts of permanent scarring, but no use at all and they stopped working entirely. Why did they always try so hard to be perfect when perfect obviously didn’t exist? Why was he trying so hard again?

Alright, alright, back to the job.

Simulate approximated ideal conditions. Leave it to age for a while. What was peak age for humans again? Between twenty and thirty-five? Twenty-five then. He aged the body to around twenty-five and stopped the simulated time. Then he briefly looked it over.

Its hair and nails had grown unhindered for the two decades and a half, and were too long to be practical, but otherwise it all looked alright. Its skin was a healthy, clean, medium brown colour, its eyes were a light brown, its hair was black and shiny, not frayed at all by the simulated aging process. All the organs seemed to be working at full capacity. He cut the nails and hair to a more reasonable length. Was anything else missing? Oh, right. Clothes. He copied something small and snappy from a woman walking around in a city somewhere, then looked his creation over once more. Alright, it looked good. Time to take it for a ride.

He materialized it into the physical plane in a dark corner of a street in the largest human city he knew of. There was a little confusion as he transferred his consciousness into its brain and suppressed most of his less human traits, but then he opened his eyes to the world as a human being for the first time in his memory.

What he could see was more or less what he had expected. The world was rendered in a dull collection of colours made up of only three primaries. No wavelengths as long as infrared, none as short as ultraviolet. No second sight, no polarization, no swirling emotions, no nothing, yet… it meant so much more to him. Blue was not just blue, it was calming and peaceful, yellow was energizing, green was refreshing and red… wow, red. That was something. And then there was the smells.

His new sensing organs could hardly detect a fraction of the substances in the air, but the ones they could detect were worth it. There was no neutrality to anything. He liked some things and disliked others, and he liked and disliked them in different ways and with differing intensity, and keeping track of all of it while simultaneously noticing his new brain processing and labelling every new input, it was overwhelming, exhilarating. He took a tentative step out of the shadows to see more, and-

Oh.

No.

Fuck.

Legs.

He missed the step completely, swerving and stumbling, and only barely avoiding smashing face-first into the sidewalk by being caught by a pair of strong arms. Luckily, his new body’s instincts for grabbing onto things in panic were stronger than those for walking.

That was an interesting experience! His whole body reacted to the fall, and now new chemicals were pumping around his bloodstream, hormones, telling his body to get ready. The sensation of blood cutting off from his less-vital organs was actually quite pleasant. And what a rush!

“Are you okay, miss?”

Oh, his brain was _really_ keyed to human speech, huh? Everything else was kind of vague, but those words went straight through his brain, clear as crystal. Humans were really focused, weren’t they? Noticing some parts of the world a lot more strongly than every other part. That reminded him; he had to focus.

He pushed himself up to a standing position against the man who had caught him. He had walked before, really. It was a crazy long time ago, but he had, he only needed to remember. That was why he was doing this, right? To remember how to act human? One step back, shift your weight, adjust your footing, move the other leg. Do you have your balance? Let go. Stand. You know this. Yeah, you know this. Walk a few steps back and forth and it’s all coming back to you.

He looked at the man and belatedly remembered thinking about his expression. How did facial expressions work again? Oh well, he would learn. Smiling, at least, seemed to be innate, because he could feel a smile plastered across his face right now.

“Yeah!” he said, and his voice was really interesting. Light and feminine. Sound only, no underlying existential dread. “Look, I can walk and everything!”

He gestured down at his legs, and before the man could say anything, he walked down the street. He liked the new legs. They were longer and much stronger than he was used to, and wow, the rhythm in this body! He only had to imagine music and his whole body moved along!

He did that for a while, relearning walking, then dancing, skipping along to the beat in his head, swinging his hips to the rhythm of imagined songs and taking in the world through human senses, not so much for the clarity as for the experience of it. This body really had been worth all the trouble it took to make it.

“Nice butt!” someone yelled from across the street.

Oh, they noticed!

“Thanks!” he yelled back, “It took a lot of effort!”

“Why don’t you come with us and we can test it out properly?” the someone asked.

The someone was a man around twenty, maybe nineteen, leaning on another man of similar age. He had dark hair and his friend had light, so telling them apart was easy enough, and he offered to help test out the new body! How nice.

“Sure!” he called back, and walked across the street. “Let’s go!”

The dark-haired man smiled brightly. There was something naggingly familiar about him. The light-haired man’s face was harder to decipher, he really had to learn how to read faces now that he couldn’t just see emotions, but then the dark-haired one slung his arm around Dipper’s neck and, wow, skin contact. That had a very nice effect on his systems.

“I’m Woy,” the dark-haired one said, “and the dork over there,” he gestured to his friend, “is Corinan. What’s your name?”

What was his name? Well, Dipper, but he couldn’t use that. That’d be stupid. He had only just met them, after all. He couldn’t use Alcor, Destroyer of Cities, Scourge of Nightmares either. That… would also be stupid. He needed a human name. Something like… Tyrone? He had used Tyrone before, right? Though, that was a boy’s name, and he was playing female at the moment. Then again, no one had been named Tyrone at all in recent human memory, so how would they know? And anyways, he liked the name.

“Tyrone,” he said, “is the name. You should call me that.”

Woy laughed and squeezed him tighter, sliding a hand down his side, but Corinan looked at him with a strange expression. Aah, his expressions were so weird, so measured and controlled. Dipper had no control. His face went where it wanted to, smiling freely and automatically mimicking everyone he saw. What did those expressions mean?

Where were they going, anyways? Applying his omniscience for a tiny moment would be the simplest way to check, but no. He was supposed to be human now. He needed to gather information the way they did.

“Where are we going?” he asked of Corinan.

“You don’t know?” came the answer, accompanied by a change in expression. What did that mean? So frustrating!

“That’s why I asked,” he said.

“We’re coming home with me to play,” Woy said.

Oh, that sounded fun!

“To play what?” he asked excitedly, and Woy pulled them to a stop. Both of them gave him that weird expression now.

“Are you on something?” Corinan asked.

“On what?”

“Drugs. Are you on drugs.”

Dipper blinked. Why would he think that? Did he smell like drugs? Could humans even smell drugs on other people? What kind of drugs were he even talking about?

“What kind of drugs are you talking about?” he asked.

Corinan waved his arms about.

“Anything! Are you on any kind of mind-altering substances at all?”

“Uuh, no? I am not on drugs. My body has been raised under better conditions than that.”

Corinan’s face scrunched up in, that was fear, Dipper knew fear. Fear like the slow beginning of a realization that you are majorly screwed grazed his features, and he slowly pulled Woy away.

“Woy, I don’t think you should bring this woman home.”

Woy looked back and forth between Dipper and Corinan a few times.

“Aww, come on, Cor,” he said, “I know she’s a little weird, but _look at her_. And she said she wasn’t on drugs.”

“Woy, I don’t think she’s _human_.”

Aw, damn. How did he guess? Was Dipper just that bad an actor? Probably. He was doing this because he was terrible at being human, after all. Oh, well, might as well try to rescue the situation.

“Yes I am!” he said, trying to look offended. What did offended look like again? “I’m such a human. I’ve got arms and legs and all the right genes and everything! Why would you think I’m not?”

“Mostly because you say stuff like that, Tyrone,”

Well, no rescuing possible here.

“Alright,” he sighed, “I admit it. This,” he gestured at himself “is new. I made it about half an hour ago. Do you like it?”

He spread his arms to the sides and spun around in a circle to show it off, and he noticed how Woy’s eyes followed him, but Corinan still looked scared. Neither of them answered.

“No seriously, do you like it? I think it looks good, but I’m not the best judge.”

Corinan tried to bring back his cryptic, guarded expression, but, being the emotion Dipper most easily recognized, the fear on his face was still obvious.

“Yeah, sure, it looks great.”

“Very sexy,” Woy shot in.

“Great!” Dipper said. “Are we gonna go test it, then? I really kinda need to.”

The two men looked at each other, then back at him.

“Uuuh…” Woy started, “there’s a food place just down the street from here, maybe we should go get a bite?”

Oh! Food! Human bodies needed sustenance, right?

“That’s a great idea! Let’s go!”

He grabbed onto Woy’s hand and moved to pull him down the street in the indicated direction, but he was held back. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that Corinan had also grabbed onto Woy, and was keeping him from moving along. His face once again had an expression of unguarded fear. Dipper was going to have to deal with this, wasn’t he?

He stopped pulling and let go, turned fully towards the two men and sighed deeply.

“Okay, why’re you so scared. I haven’t even _tried_ to hurt anyone since I got here!”

Corinan hesitated for a bit before answering, looking Dipper over in a way he still had no way to decipher.

“…Because we don’t know who you are, what you are, what you’re capable of or what you want with us. Why _wouldn’t_ we be scared?”

That was… logical. Reasonable, even. Darn it. He wasn’t planning to hurt anyone, obviously. This whole escapade was an attempt to remove himself from that, but how was he going to convince the guys of that?

Why was he even trying to?

Who _were_ these guys, anyways? Should he just try finding someone else? Should he try doing this stuff on his own?

No.

Nah. He didn’t want to give up now. He liked them, and he really wanted to play with them.

He crossed his arms and looked at them, thinking. Then he got distracted by the new shapes protruding from his chest. Oh, right. Women had those. Why exactly they did, he couldn’t fathom. They seemed pretty useless.

Huh.

They were kind of interesting, though. Funny little things.

Woy made a funny sound, and Dipper realized he had gotten completely side-tracked.

He hastily folded his arms across his chest again. “Right,” he said. “So, you shouldn’t be scared because I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Just like that, eh?” Corinan said. What was that tone? Oh, right. Sarcasm. His voice was dripping with sarcasm.

“Yeah?” Dipper ventured. “Why not?”

“Well, for one,” Corinan said, even more sarcastic now. “You could be lying.”

Lying.

Holy hell.

 _That_ was a thing.

Dipper gaped. “I completely forgot that was a thing humans did,” he said, and stared at his hands.

Could he lie? He remembered having lied at some point, now that he thought about it, but he also though he’d been pretty bad at it. Should he try it out? He did want to. The next time he found a reason to, he though, he would try lying.

There was a sudden sound, and Dipper jumped and looked around before he realized it was just Corinan laughing. _Laughing_. That was a thing he hadn’t tried yet.

Dipper started laughing too, just for the sake of it, even though he had no idea what they were laughing at. Woy joined in just about when Corinan stopped, which started him up again, and for a little while, the three of them just stood there, on the sidewalk, laughing. It was _amazing_. Dipper couldn’t understand why humans didn’t do it all the time.

“Alright, fine,” Corinan said, once they quieted down to the level where it was just Woy giggling a little. “We’ll trust you, for now, if only because I’m not sure if it’s safe to let you wander around on your own.”

Dipper was still not sure what he had said to change the man’s mind, but he nodded with a smile anyways. “Why wouldn’t it be safe?” he asked.

The guys stared walking and moved him along so they were once again walking towards the food place.

“Partially because I’m afraid you’ll walk into traffic and cause trouble for TC, or get yourself killed, and partially because I’m afraid of what people might do to you.”

He felt like he should know what TC was. Ah well, better figure it out the human way.

“What’s TC?” he asked.

Corinan sent him one of those strange looks again. What was that? Confusion? He thought it might be confusion.

“Traffic Control?” he said. Asked? No, said. It just sounded like a question. “You know, the AI network that makes sure the roads are accident-free?”

Right, yeah, he remembered that. It had only been there a few hundred years, so it was no wonder it slipped his mind. He recalled similar systems being set up other places, but its development had been relatively late on this… planet? Now why did that sound wrong?

Wait. There was something else strange too.

“What might people do to me?”

Corinan laughed again, but a different kind of laugh. “Well, you see, Tyrone,” he said. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but you are, at the moment, an unusually pretty woman.”

“Very, pretty,” Woy shot in from his other side.

“Yes, and you act kind of like… like you’re not entirely there, if you get me?”

Dipper shook his head. That made no sense. Sure, he’d left most of his power behind in the mindscape, but all of him that made him _him_ was currently here, in this body.

“Uh, okay. You act like you’re a little out of your mind? Like you’re a bit crazy, or on drugs, you know? And some people are gonna see that and see a chance to do something that you won’t be able to understand how to prevent, as evidenced by how you decided to follow along with Woy even though you didn’t get what he really wanted.”

Dipper looked from side to side, between Woy and Corinan, and asked, “And what was that?”

They stopped in front of a door with a glowing sign over it. The doors were made of glass and there were people moving around inside the building. Corinan let out a breath. A sigh. That was a sigh. Right.

“How about we get something to eat, and then I explain, yeah?”

Dipper smiled again, then. Food still sounded great. “Sure!” he said, and then they moved through the doors, which moved aside on their own as they approached.

Corinan stopped beside a strange machine just inside the doors, and he touched it and a screen lit up. Dipper jumped in surprise, and then he looked around. There were more of the strange machines standing there, and someone else was poking at another one, apparently selecting things off the screen.

“So what do you want?” Corinan asked, and gestured to the screen of their machine.

Dipper leaned closer and saw a lot of writing and pictures of things that had to be food. “I don’t know what any of this is,” he said.

Corinan sighed, and muttered, “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” before he raised his voice again. “I’ll just have to pick for you, then. Do you have any money?”

Money? Right, that. Did he? He thought back.

Yes.

Wait, no.

Money stopped working if you waited too long, didn’t it? He didn’t have the right currency.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“Alright, then,” Corinan said. “Something cheap, coming right up.”

While the guys decided what they wanted to get for themselves, Dipper looked around at the environment. It was very friendly-looking. Nice colours, and the people who gave people their food were smiling. Dipper’s own cheeks were hurting from all the smiling, he realized. Well, he had been smiling a little widely. He was starting to get a bit of a grip on expressions. Maybe he should try controlling his own a little more.

Their food was ready incredibly quickly, they found a table to sit at, and Dipper was handed his food. Then he took a bite to taste.

He recognized the concept of fast-food, when he looked through his memory, even if he couldn’t recognize this exact kind of it. He had forgotten what it tasted like.

He devoured half his plate before it came to mind that eating too much of this kind of food would quickly ruin the good conditions this body had been grown under. Was that a factor he wanted to consider? He could of course just undo any damage done to it with a thought, but that would kind of go against the original purpose of living like a human, wouldn’t it? How long was he going to keep this up, anyways?

Then he realized he’d eaten the rest of it while he was thinking about that, and decided not to worry about it for now.

Huh, cutlery.

The fork in his hand, once devoid of food, brought back faint memories of a long forgotten time.

After a moment’s contemplation, he stabbed the fork’s tines into his other hand.

OW!

Oh, ouch. Pain really _hurt_ in a human body, didn’t it? Fascinating!

He grinned widely, forgetting himself again. “Oh, wow. I don’t want to do that again!” he said.

A hand was put on top of the one with the fork in it.

Dipper looked up to see Corinan looking at him, his own food forgotten halfway to his mouth. “Then don’t,” he said.

“Of course not,” Dipper said, dropping the fork. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know why you did it in the first place!” Corinan said, slightly less controlled than he had been before.

Looking to the side, Dipper realized Woy was also staring at him instead of eating.

“I just wanted to know what pain felt like,” he said.

Corinan did not look reassured, but he did let go of Dipper’s hand and went back to eating. “Well,” he said between bites. “Now you know, so don’t do that again.”

“Okay,” Dipper said, and tasted his drink. It was very sweet, and he drank most of it before he continued. “You said you were going to explain something to me?”

Corinan closed his eyes and emitted a sound that had to be a groan.

One explanation later, Dipper was, if anything, more confused. Woy had wanted- with him? But why? What?

This felt intensely backwards for some reason. Why was that? What exactly was it about this situation that felt so bizarre?

This was weird. He knew about human copulation instincts, of course, he’d only forgotten that they might apply to him now that he was human, and he’d never really minded them. He had a bit against the ridiculous effects it had on social interactions, but that was about it, so what was it about Woy that made this seem so wrong? Like it was the other way around from how it should be?

Wait.

“Wendy!” he shouted, when he got it, and pointed his finger at Woy. “That’s who you were!”

“Uh, what?” was Woy’s eloquent response.

Dipper just laughed. “Oh, I used to know someone who had your soul, is all. It happens sometimes. Caught me off guard this time, just.”

“O… kay?” Woy said.

Corinan, on the other hand, looked more or less mind blown. “You can see his _soul_?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Dipper said.

Corinan blinked. His lips moved soundlessly for a bit, and the he said, “Wait, _why_ exactly are you pretending to be human?”

He explained.

\---

Dipper awoke with a thundering headache.

Why did he have a headache? Why did pain hurt? Why had he been sleeping? Why on a couch in an apartment he’d never seen before? No seriously, why did he have a headache?

Oh yeah.

He’d been drinking.

Quite a lot.

He made a mental note to not do that too much if he wanted to keep his body in good condition.

He navigated himself into a sitting position and looked down at his crumpled clothes and the blanked bunched around his waist. His very feminine waist.

The memories of last night came back in force, and he contemplated keeping the headache for a few seconds before a sharp sting of pain made him give in and reset his body to factory settings, so to say. He immediately felt a lot better.

Right, he had explained his situation. Corinan had inferred from what he said who he was, and he had needed to reassure them once again that he did not actually want to rip their bodies apart and feast on their souls. He just wanted to be human for a bit.

A human who happened to be a very pretty but penniless woman named Tyrone.

Heh.

He took it as a good sign that he was now able to see the ridiculousness of that.

Anyways, after that, they had decided that getting very drunk was in order, Dipper had seen no reason to say no to a new experience, and they had searched out a bar.

Memories after that got a little fuzzy.

There might have been something very similar to tequila involved, and he distinctly remembered karaoke, which was strange, because he was pretty sure karaoke didn’t exist at this point in time.

Oh well.

And after that, yeah this was the guys’ apartment, then.

They were… roommates. Right. Or, something like it.

A non-romantic yet committed relationship, with several nuances he was still not entirely clear on, and he couldn’t quite remember the name of it either. Something that hadn’t existed, at least not this commonly, in the society and culture he had grown up in. It was very interesting really.

The world was very different now from what it once had been, but in many ways it was still so similar.

The kitchen of the apartment, for example, was still recognisable as a kitchen.

There were, in fact, eggs in a cupboard, though they were conserved with a localized time-dilution instead of low temperatures. The oven did still cook with temperature, and after searching for only a few seconds, he even found a frying pan, salt, and spices. Operation fried-eggs-for-breakfast was a go.

Either the smell of eggs woke him up, or this was just the time for it, because Woy wandered into the room a few minutes later, looking as if he could use a factory reset himself.

He stood in the door and blinked at Dipper a few times before he said, “You know, I’d kinda hoped you were just a weird dream.”

Dipper looked up from where he was putting the finished eggs onto plates he’d fetched from a non-time-diluted cupboard, and raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, no offence or anything! I just, er, I mean-”

Dipper laughed and shook his head, and then put the plates on the table. “Do you want breakfast?” he said.

Woy looked at the plate. “Eggs? For breakfast?”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” Dipper shrugged.

“No, no. I’ll have it,” Woy said, and sat down to eat.

A few minutes later, Corinan also stopped in the door to his bedroom.

“Oh,” he said. “You.”

“Me!” Dipper said with a smile.

“She made us breakfast,” Woy said, and gestured to the last plate.

“Oh,” Corinan said.

He sat down and started eating after only an initial dubious glance at the eggs. And then there was silence for a little while.

Until it was broken, of course.

“Say, can I ask?” Corinan asked.

“Sure,” Dipper said.

“Why female? I mean, there aren’t that many records of you preserved, all things considered, but you are usually male. So what gives?”

“Why not?” Dipper shrugged. “Sure, the gender thing is an old habit, but so’s killing people for fun. It’s not like I couldn’t break it.”

“Oh.” Corinan looked a little sick.

Dipper couldn’t help but laugh. “Regret asking?” He held up his fork to the ceiling light and asked, “Where and how do you wash these things, anyway? I’ve… been a little disconnected lately.”

Still looking queasy, Corinan pointed towards another fancy cupboard. “Just toss’em in there. We’ll run it after dinner today. You, uh, you’re looking a lot less deranged today than you did yesterday.”

“Yeah, well- Ooh, fancy!” he said as he opened the cupboard and got a look at the mechanisms inside. “It’s coming back to me. I used to know how to do all that social interaction and communication stuff, I just forgot, and now it’s resurfacing again.”

“Like riding a bike, eh?” Woy asked.

“Hah, I wish.” Dipper placed his plate and cutlery into the fancy cupboard and accepted the ones from the guys as well. “Humans are _complicated_. I get all the basic stuff, but I’ll still have to relearn all the nuances, which,” he closed the cupboard and leaned back against the counter, looking at them, “neatly leads to the next natural question.”

“What now?” Corinan said.

“Yep, exactly. What now.”

 


	9. Hunters in the Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mostly inspired by [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2709113/chapters/6312020). 
> 
> It's not as long as it could be, but I had to stop it somewhere, and I started writing it ages ago so I don't remember exactly how it was supposed to end. Ah, finishing old fics. There's a charm to it.

The scenes on the screen flash in and fade to black. Several soundless shots, each lasting only a few moments.

_*Heartbeat.*_

A woman walks down a poorly lit hallway, away from the camera. She carries an axe in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other. Her red hair cascades down to the middle back of her flannel shirt, and she walks confidently, ready for anything.

_*Heartbeat.*_

Two hooded men meet unconsciousness at the blunt edge of her axe and her foot to the face.

_*Heartbeat.*_

Another breaks his fingers between her axe, the wall and his own gun. Moments later, his head meets the wall too, at the mercy of her burning bottle.

_*Heartbeat.*_

A pure black, snarling creature, looking somewhat like a dog, is thrown into a wall and falls unmoving to the ground.

_*Heartbeat.*_

The woman walks faster now, almost running. On the ground lies curled up hooded figures. She gets to the end of the hallway and kicks open a door, ready to throw the bottle.

_*Heartbeat.*_

There is a room with a circle on the floor. Around the circle stands several hooded people, and in the middle of it, a black-suited demon rises from the shadows. He looks up, into the camera, and the sound of heartbeats stops. For several seconds, there is nothing but silence as his face slowly turns into a snarl.

_This summer…_

Then, there is sound and he shoves her hard against a wall and growls at her. “ **How dare you?** ” And she answers, nearly growling herself, “Kill me or leave.”

_light and darkness…_

Another demon, this one female, wearing pink and sporting uncanny swan-like features, curl her disproportioned wings around the woman like a cage, and strokes her cheek with one bone-white talon. The demon ignores the blade at her throat, and speaks with a mischievous smile. “ **You sure are something.** ”

_converge…_

The besuited demon sits in the middle of a crater of destruction, a look of fury on his face. Behind him, the swan-like demon lounges in midair. She speaks in a bored tone. “ **All the destruction in the world, maybe, but you were never a liar.** ”

He snarls and turns a little, but not enough to look at her slowly spreading smile. “ **I’m not lying,** ” he says, and she tilts her head.

“ **Aren’t you?** ”

_and even the blackest…_

The demon and the woman stare at each other in anger until the sound of a door locking is heard, and they both turn to call out in annoyance. All they get in answer is giggling.

_of hearts…_

One wry smile from her.

He looks away.

A hand reaches out to grab a casually forgotten axe, and a hand with black claws meets it midway.

He puts his hand on her chest and she looks back with a smile in her eyes.

_can beat._

_Hunters in the Dark_

_Coming soon…_

_*Heartbeat.*_

\---

Dipper blinked. Then he looked up from the screen of the laptop, which currently showed the credits of the movie trailer, to where Wendy was standing behind it.

“Sooo,” he began, “it’s… an action, horror, romance movie starring you… and me.”

“Yeah, dude,” she answered, a huge grin splitting her face. “You wanna see it?”

“Wendy…”

“Seriously.” She closed the laptop with both hands, then leaned over to look him in the eyes. “Okay, listen. A while ago, pretty long time now actually, I was in Hollywood for a thing, not important what, and I ran into Pacifica. Anyways, long story short, I ended up at this party with a lot of movie people and ended up talking to this guy, a director or something, and we drank a little together and stuff and I ended up talking about you. Nothing bad or anything! Just mentioned that I knew you and we talked a bit about how much the movies tend to get wrong and, well. I kinda ended up telling him about that time in the bunker. You know, when Mabel locked us in a closet because you had a crush on me? Even though it wasn’t really a closet, but whatever. The point is, he asked if he could pitch a movie based on that, and I said, sure! As long as Alcor and I get to come to the pre-screening, and yeah. I had to promise you wouldn’t hurt anyone, but he said yes and now we’re here. Wanna come?”

Dipper took a moment to process that dump of information before he spoke. “Seriously?”

“Oh, come on dude. We hardly ever hang out anymore. And I know you don’t like romance movies, but this is just you and me, it’s not like it’ll be awkward anymore, and I made him promise you and Mizar would be siblings, nothing more, and with the actors lined up and the writing and everything, I think it might actually be kinda good, and I’ve never been to a pre-screening of a movie before! We’re gonna get to meet all the actors! Come oooon.”

He hesitated. Over the years, quite a lot of movies with ‘him’ in them had come out, and he had good reasons for hating all of them, but… this did sound better than anything Twin Souls related, and it _had_ been ages since last time he hung out with Wendy. And with the writer in the room while he watched it, he would be able to terrorize the ones responsible immediately if he hated it. So…

“Why not?” he said, and his smile almost matched hers.

\---

Robert Gabler was incredibly nervous.

Partially because of the size of the project. This was the biggest movie he had ever directed, and the biggest names he had ever worked with, but he was also sure it would be a success. It had come out almost exactly as he had imagined it, and he had yet to speak with a person who thought it was any less than good, possibly great. No, he was nervous because this exact day had been haunting him for over a year.

It was the culmination of all their hard work. The first time they would get to see the movie on a big screen, and the guest list was one name longer than he wanted it to be.

He had been drunk, really, a little more than he should have been, when he found himself sitting in the corner of a party, talking to an actual living legend. He was looking for inspiration, the Alcor craze was at its peak, and she not only knew him, but had enough info to give Robert exactly the big break he had been hoping for. Letting her sit in on the pre-screening seemed a small price to pay, and the demon? Well, she had promised no one would get hurt, and she also said he would most likely not show at all, and it slipped Robert’s mind. Now though, now it was all he could think about.

He toyed with his collar, trying to pretend it was too tight and that was why he had trouble breathing. Everyone else had already arrived, and in five minutes, they would start the show regardless of whether or not the demon hunter or her friend had shown up. He looked out over the parking lot and hoped very hard that it would stay empty, that he would not have to explain to the people indoors exactly who and what was invited to spend two hours and change in a room with them. Demon hunting was a busy job, no?

He let his eyes sweep over the empty lot once again, then closed them, swallowed and pulled at his collar. He opened his eyes and saw two people in the middle of the lot.

They had definitely not been there three seconds ago.

He recognized the tallest one of them as Wendy Corduroy immediately. She was rather hard to miss, really. The shortest one was… not what he had expected.

He was actually the shortest one, for one. Sure, Wendy was hardly a short woman, but one would expect demons to be, well, a little more imposing? For another thing, he was actually standing on the ground like a person. Even with the extremely Alcor-iconic suit, he might have been mistaken for a normal human. Except the actual set of wings sprouting from his lower back. And the eyes. His eyes were unmistakably demonic.

The couple made their way towards him, chatting like old friends tended to, and Robert realized he was shaking even as Wendy’s smile grew at the sight of him.

“Hey dude! Hey, long time no see, you… what’s your name again?”

“It’s Robert,” the demon at her side supplied, a slight echo accompanying his voice, even at that low volume more menacing than anything their sound technicians had managed, and Robert felt the bottom of his stomach fall through the ground, but Wendy just smiled.

“Right! That was it, thanks. Hey Rob, dude. We’re not late, are we?”

“You’re right on time, actually,” he managed to say. “We were just about to start. Let me show you in.”

Just as he turned to lead them through the door, he caught a glimpse of something nasty in the demon’s smile. Suddenly, he was one hundred percent sure that he was enjoying his fear.

\---

Laura Lewis was very excited.

Partially this was because the crew would finally get to see the fruits of their two years of labour, and she was pretty dams sure it was going to be good, but mostly it was because of a certain other person on the guest list for the night.

There was a reason Laura had gotten the role of Wendy Corduroy in this movie, and it was certainly not because she looked the part. Even after the makeup department worked its magic to give her something like the right hair, she missed about a foot of height. No, she got the role on pure enthusiasm. Ever since she learned of Wendy, the woman had been one of her greatest idols, and she would have sacrificed a limb to get to play her in a movie. Luckily, all they demanded of her was that she dye her hair.

The important thig was that Wendy was supposed to be here tonight, and Laura was very excited. It was all she could do not to shriek when she recognized the woman walking through the door.

“Oh my god!” she… said. It was not a shriek.

Wendy looked down at her with a bemused look in her eyes.

“I… just, have always wanted to meet you,” Laura said. “You’re the coolest person I know of, and, I really hope I managed to portray you properly, I really tried, but you’ve just got this kinda, concentrated awesome or something, and that’s not exactly easy to portray. And also I know I’m way too short, but I didn’t know it was _this_ much…”

She took a deep breath and bit her lips to stop from rambling further.

“Heh, ‘s alright,” Wendy said. “I’m sure you did great. And it’s not like you’re the one with the worst size difference in this room.”

“…Oh?”

Wendy too a few steps forward so the man behind her could step into the room, and oh…

Shit.

Every sound in the room seemed to stop as the crowd recognized him.

Somewhere behind Laura, Jason seemed to have stopped breathing.  She thought it was because Wendy’s eyes landed on him, and the woman’s grin was a disturbing shade of mischievous.

Then a gasp ran through the room as she grabbed onto her friend’s – _Alcor’s_ – shirtsleeve, and pulled him along, actual fucking wings trailing behind him like living shawls woven from darkness, and placed him in front of Jason.

Yep, he definitely was not breathing.

Alcor seemed to go along without complaint for whatever Wendy was doing, though he did shoot an amused smile at the terrified stares of the crowd.

Wendy placed one hand at about the height of Alcor’s head, and then another at Jason’s height, about sixteen inches higher up, and then looked back at Laura.

“See?” she said. “What do you call this?”

Laura just gaped.

Alcor, on the other hand, raised an eyebrow. “Perfectly normal?” he said. “This always happens. I don’t think they’ve caught on to the fact that I’m actually pretty short. Probably because I’m usually floating everywhere.” He gestured at his feet, firmly planted on the floor from when Wendy had placed him there. “It makes me look taller.”

Wendy folded her arms and laughed. “Yeah, good point. I’ve always wondered, though.” She turned around and walked between the people to find a seat, and Alcor followed her. “I mean, you’re a _shapeshifter_. Why not just make yourself taller?”

Laura relaxed slightly when he just rolled his eyes instead of deciding to eat someone. Around her, she felt others do the same, but the sense of acute nervousness in the air stayed.

“Yeah, right,” Alcor said. “As if she wouldn’t laugh herself sick if I tried.”

Aisha, who played Mizar, and expertly, at that, stifled a laugh beside her.

“Truth,” Wendy said, completely relaxed despite the tension in the room. “Hey, are we still waiting for anyone?”

Robert Gabler shook his head in response.

“Alright then. Let’s get this show in the road!”

Alcor snapped his fingers, and the movie projector started on its own, making everyone have to hurry to their seats. And then the movie started.

\---

Alcor did not eat anyone at the pre-screening.

That was not to say that he was a perfectly polite moviegoer, but all things considered, they could forgive him crying of laughter at lines delivered by the movie depiction of himself, especially since Wendy howled even louder.

It was not actually supposed to be a funny movie, but the rest of them still found themselves laughing along at the staticky choking sounds coming from the demon, or at the third line repeated in a ridiculous voice by Wendy.

If nothing else, it seemed like they enjoyed it.


	10. Midwinter Welcoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Circlers' probably isn't a good name for the circle followers, but eh.

Jumanah felt the butterflies of anticipation fluttering in her stomach as she dressed up.

Golden stars in her ears to match the ones speckling her dress and the ones drawn in the corners of her eyes with glittering lines. Some might say it was a little much, but this was a special day, and while she had done this many times before, it would always be just as exciting. It was midwinter.

Most religions with some presence in places with harsh winters had some sort of midwinter holiday. This being Christmas, Hanukkah, or Yule, they all had the same basic function, to light up the dark, and for the Circle of the Dreamers’ Star, it was the Midwinter Welcoming.

It was the biggest celebration of the year, every year. Every circler within a large radius converged in a single place, carrying gifts and food for a long feast that lasted from early evening and long into the night. There would be singing and dancing eating and drinking, children playing, adults partying, those in between left to their own devices to have fun, and if they were lucky, the Lord himself.

The Midwinter Welcoming had no specific date for exactly that reason. The actual Welcoming itself, the summoning and ceremonial invitation for their Lord to join the festivities, was the highlight and opening of the event, and it required worldwide careful organization to make sure no two circles pulled at his attention at once.

Today was their day. Jumanah’s day. Her parents and their circle’s day.

Her family had been part of the Circle for as far back as anyone could remember. They had never been ringleaders, any of them, but they were politicians and lawyers, always donating their resources to their community, and today, the Midwinter Welcoming would take place in their home, and Jumanah was very excited.

Downstairs, the first guests were just arriving, to be greeted by her mother and set to work on the last of the decorations. Jumanah finished up her own makeup and ran down the stairs to help out.

The house was gorgeous, decorated from floor to ceiling and thoroughly cleaned. Most of their personal belongings were tidied away, the guest rooms upstairs were readied and a huge table in one of the larger rooms stood ready to hold the gifts for the feast. As of yet, only a few dishes were placed there, alongside the stacks of plates and cutlery, and the vases of flowers, but soon it would be overflowing, she knew.

Another room was cleared of furniture completely. The windows of this room led to the garden, and the tall hedge around that made sure no one would be able to look in. On the floor of this room, a large circle was drawn, with symbols known primarily to ringleaders and devout circlers. Also in the room was a pair of rabbits in a cage, ready for the sacrifice.

The guests kept steadily arriving. The table filled up with food and the floor filled up with children. The excitement in the air rose slowly with the chatter, and the crowd grew denser every minute until there were almost a hundred people in the house, and then someone rang a bell.

Instantly, everyone quieted and perked up. Then the tone of the chatter changed, and they all started moving towards the summoning room.

It took a while for everyone to settle down and make themselves comfortable. With this many people present, it was near impossible to make sure everyone got a decent view, but they tried. Then Ringleader Watson stepped up to the circle.

A silence fell over the crowd. Two quick, efficient cuts ended the lives of the rabbits. Ringleader Watson chanted the words, loudly, so everyone could hear, and the crowd joined in on the parts they knew. A swirl of black smoke seeped from the circle in a silent whirlwind of shadows.

And then… it popped. Like a balloon.

The Lord sat in the middle of the circle. Actually sat, on the floor. His wings were splayed behind him, carelessly scratching lines into the floor, and his eyes were wide and fully golden. He looked up at them with a smile and a- Jumanah did not want to say guileless, but yes, a guileless look in his eyes.

Watson had been a ringleader for over two decades, and had seen quite a few things in his time, and so, his only reaction was a few blinks of surprise.

Alcor tilted his head to the side, still smiling. His movements had a hint of sluggishness, and he seemed unfocused.

Ringleader Watson caught himself, and recited the traditional invitation to partake in the festivities and the food and the drink. The crowd held their breaths in anticipation for the answer. They all hoped the Lord would stay, but they knew that it was only sometimes that he did.

Then the Lord opened his mouth and gave a long, loud, eldritch meow, and before anyone could recover, he jumped right over their heads and through the door heading into the rest of the house.

For all this was unusual behaviour, the meaning was clear enough. One way or another, he would stay, and they rejoiced, and started the party.

Any good circler knew that the Lord sometimes acted differently. That sometimes, he would play elaborate pranks, be in a bad mood, or simply follow the strangest of whims for no discernible reason, and they would follow along on whatever it was. Today, it seemed he had decided to act the part of a cat, taking it so far as to not speak at all, push things off the table, and lounge in people’s laps until they petted him.

If nothing else, it made for a good conversational subject. And it was fun, in a way. It was bizarre, but they were used to bizarre, and it was impossible to doubt he was having fun himself.

He stole food off people’s plates when they looked away, and then retreated to the top of a closet to eat it.

He ran all the children through the house in a merry chase, tumbling around and licking them whenever he caught them.

He ran underfoot and tripped up Ringleader Watson until the man fell flat on his face in the middle of the living room, and most of the other guests were too busy laughing at the Lord’s self-satisfied expression to help him up.

And, as the night ran long, he constructed a nest in a corner out of half the pillows, blankets and sweaters in the house and lay down in it. It took them almost an hour to realize he was not alone in it.

It was when the first of the families with children decided to go home, and could not find any of said children, that they started to suspect.

Further investigation revealed that no one could find any at all of the children that had been at the party.

After a thorough search of the house, finding nothing, someone dared to carefully lift the top blanket of the blanket nest, and found the Lord, snuggled on top of a veritable pile of children, all snoring lightly.

He had most his limbs thoroughly tangled into the blankets and tightly curled around the children, and any attempts to extricate a child from the pile resulted in a tightened grip and a low growl, so they quickly accepted that this was where the kids would sleep that night. There was nothing to do about it.

The families who were not planning to stay the night in town were offered rooms to sleep in around the house, and eventually also in the surrounding houses, and extra blankets and pillows were brought in to make up for the missing ones.

Just a few hours later, the last of the party winded down, and lights were slowly turned off.

Jumanah could not sleep.

Despite the oddities, the Welcoming had been wildly successful. Now, the sounds of dozens of sleeping people resounded through the halls of her house, and she could not sleep.

She gave up and got out of bed. She carefully snuck down the stairs to get a glass of water, and on the way to the kitchen, she passed the darkened living room. A few moments later, she heard a sound as of someone shaking huge sheets in the wind… or possibly like someone with wings getting up and shaking themselves awake.

She twirled around on the spot and almost ran back to look through the door, and saw the Lord gently pulling a blanket back over the pile of children.

He looked up at the sound of her. His eyes were a lot more focused now, the thin, golden slits she remembered from a dozen other welcomings, instead of the monochrome gold they had been. There was a soft smile at his lips.

She reflexively opened her mouth to greet him, but he raised a hand and put a finger across his lips, pointing down at the kids. Then he straightened up, winked, and was gone.

She walked back into the kitchen to get her glass of water.

She could never quite understand why anyone would need a normal god.


	11. Starting Anew, Again 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several people asked for a sequel to day 8. The truth is I already knew what was to happen next, but I didn't include it because the genre shift would be too drastic. Anyways, here it is.

Woy watched the launch.

He always watched the launches, even though they happened at odd times and out in the middle of nowhere, and he was a poor student. He made sure to make room in the weekly budget for a ride out to the launch complex every week.

It lay a bit over an hour outside the city, and even that was closer than it was for most people. It was one of the reasons he had decided to go to this particular academy, even though his family all lived on the other side of the continent. Without Corinan around, he would not have anyone at all.

He rarely got all the way up to the complex, preferring to stop the cab some way away and stand there to see the whole ascent into the sky.

He pulled his jacket tighter around him against the evening chill, and the shuttle rose slowly from the launch platform. It accelerated quickly, piercing through a few scattered clouds after just a few seconds, and then it was gone, the only sign left of it being a faint pinpoint of light and the hole in the clouds.

Once it reached orbit, it would dock with the much, much larger ship, the C.S.S. Jean, and trade its wares for theirs, and then it would come back. Jean, on the other hand, would soon escape their orbit and continue on its way along the interstellar trading route, leaving their little planet behind.

Maybe spending all this money on the cab every week just to see thirty seconds of shuttle launch was not the brightest idea, but Woy never regretted it. This was it for him. This was his goal, everything he was working towards. Some day, he would come with one of those shuttles get out in the world, get a ship of his own to pilot. It was only for now that he still had his feet on the ground.

Another gust of wind snuck into his sleeves, and he shuddered and got back in the cab. He typed his address into the driver-computer, and leaned back to rest. Above the glass ceiling, the shuttle was long since lost between the stars.

\---

Cor had a cup of something warm to drink ready for him when he came home to the apartment.

“You have fun?” he asked, expression clearly showing that he doubted it.

“Yep, it was great,” Woy answered flippantly. “They were using shuttle 3 again, so I guess they must’ve fixed her up since last month.”

He was just about to delve into a long ramble about shuttles, launch times, and whatever he could think of just to annoy Cor, when he realized something was missing.

“Say,” he said. “Where’s Tyrone? She usually waits up. Did she go to bed early or something?”

By now, it was almost easy to talk about Tyrone without thinking too hard about what exactly it was she was.

The strange, strange woman, who had turned out to be something and someone quite different, had crashed into their lives over half a year ago, and promptly settled on their couch. They had been dubious of course, but she had nowhere else to go, she promised to do housework for them, and she seemed harmless enough, mostly, so they let her stay there for a while. The fact that she was practically supernaturally gorgeous had nothing at all to do with that decision. Definitely not.

Either way, she was a fast learner, and only a few weeks later she could keep an entire conversation like a normal human. She still missed pieces here and there, but they were getting fewer and fewer, and eventually she even got a job to pay her rent. She made life surprisingly much more pleasant.

The point was, this living room was devoid of Tyrones.

“Oh, she was asking about the launch, so I told her she might possibly be able to see it from the roof. It’s a clear night, after all,” he said, and then he realized what that meant.

“Cor,” Woy said. “The launch was over an hour ago. Is she still up there?”

Cor gave him a look, and then they both walked out the door towards the stairs to the roof.

Tyrone stood stock-still in the middle of the roof.

Woy drew a silent breath of relief that she had not done something stupid like jump off. He still vividly remembered he look in her eyes as she enthusiastically stabbed herself with a fork, and she might not be as insane now as she had been, but he still worried about her quite often.

No, she was right there, on the roof, though she did not seem like she had noticed them coming. She stood with her head tilted back, arms hanging at her sides, just staring.

The boys exchanged a look and a raised eyebrow that had rapidly come to mean ‘Tyrone is being weird again’. Then they approached her carefully.

“Stargazing?” Cor asked.

She jolted to as she finally noticed them, and whipped her head around to look. The wild look in her eyes was a sure sign that she was too deep in thought to control her expressions, but she reined it in after a few seconds.

“Ah, yeah,” she said. “It’s a little weird, isn’t it? That we can see this many stars even in the city?”

“What, you’re worried about light pollution?” Woy asked. “We wouldn’t want to piss off the scouters, would we?”

“The who?”

Tyrone looked confused. Woy allowed himself a smile. This was a familiar dance by now.

“Right,” Cor said. “You wouldn’t know. Alright, history lesson.” He walked up beside Tyrone and put an arm around her shoulders, smiling comfortingly. “The scouters are technically this planet’s leading religion. Do you know about the Years of Isolation?”

She furrowed her brows and thought back. “Oh, you mean back when G-net went down?”

This time it was Cor’s time to look confused, so she continued.

“Galaxy-wide internet. They used to call it just interstellar coms, but once it got large enough that most of all information was stored there, they ended up changing it. And then a gamma-ray-burst hit Chromiar – what was it, a thousand years ago? One and a half? – and every single server went down, taking most of society’s collected knowledge with it.” She looked contemplative. “Right, that’s why you stopped using warp-ships. You lost the tech for it. You’re still using FTL ones, but I remembered them being faster. And no instant coms between systems either.”

“Right,” Cor said, in a slightly choked voice. “That was it. I keep forgetting you were actually here for this stuff.”

She looked at him, as if to whisper, _a hundred thousand years old, Corinan_ , and he cleared his throat.

“Right, anyways. It took about fifty years before we managed to get back in contact with the rest of the universe. Technically almost two generations. You could say they were a bit desperate to find a trace of people out there, to prove that everyone else hadn’t just disappeared somehow. The scouters rose from that. As people who weren’t engineers or physicists or anything like that, they started watching manually, scouring the sky with telescopes or even their bare eyes to see if they could get a glimpse of an approaching ship. Even after the ships actually came, the tradition stays around. People won’t accept having to live in a place where they can’t see the stars.”

At that, they looked out over the city, at all the light sources that were designed specifically to prevent as much light as possible from reflecting back into the sky.

“Right,” Tyrone said. “That makes sense.”

“So…” Woy said. “Why were you stargazing so hard, anyways?”

Tyrone flinched and bit her teeth together when he asked. He got a better look at her face, and… had she been crying? In the low light, it was hard to see, but it looked that way. Damn.

She looked away, back at the stars. After a little while, she pointed up at them. “Do you know which star that is?” she asked.

“Which one?” He walked closer, trying to sight along her arm. “That red one?”

“No, a little behind- I mean, beside it. It’s fainter, and slightly lower in the sky.”

He thought he might see which one she was talking about. “I see it. No I don’t know what it’s named. Why?”

She swallowed audibly. She did not take her eyes of the star.

“I named my sister after that star, you know. I guess… after all this time, it’s hard for me to see one without thinking of the other.”

“Your sister?” Cor asked. “Do you miss her?”

She grimaced. Her eyes were wild again, wild and painful, glued to a star in the sky that only held meaning to her.

“Yes?” she said. “No? I don’t know. I- I don’t-” She finally looked away, only to shut her eyes completely draw her arms up and hug herself, shuddering. “I know where she is right now. I know who she is and what she does. I promised myself I’d go see her when I had my mind back and now I _do_ , and I’m… I’m running out of excuses.”

“Tyrone…” Cor put a hand on each of her shoulders, concern clear on his face. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s been so long.” She looked up at him. “I always come back to her. I’ve always come back to her, every time. I own her soul, you know? I should own every part of her, but it’s not like that. A hundred thousand years and I can’t let go of her, she won’t let go of me. She _owns me!_ The town we grew up in is a lake, slowly merging with the ocean, and has been for so long even I can’t sense a trace of what it used to be, and I _still_ can’t stop coming back there, every few centuries. She doesn’t even know who I _am_ , and she’s _still_ the only thing on my mind!”

Her voice rose slowly until she was shouting. Cor gave a gentle push, and then a not-so-gentle one, to move her back towards the door. A second later, Woy gave him a hand. Tyrone pushed against them, seemingly ignorant of their attempts to move her.

Then she looked up to the stars and screamed, “Let go of me, already! Are you happy now? I can barely remember you anymore! Let me go!”

“There you go,” Woy said, trying to be soothing. “Shh. That’s it. Let’s go inside now, and leave the stars to do their own thing.”

Tyrone fell slack in their arms, and they carried her back inside.

\---

She sat on the couch with a warm cup to drink in her hands, still shaking, but getting better. They sat on either side of her, a little unsure what to do.

“You any better?” Woy asked.

“Little bit,” she answered. “I’m sorry about freaking out so bad. I didn’t mean to, it’s just…”

“Right,” he said. “Well, do you think you could try… not worrying about it?”

She gave him a questioning look.

“Um,” he said. “Was that a stupid question? All I’m saying is that you’ve been doing well with us all this time, I don’t see why it has to change now.”

“Did you see her before?” Cor shot in.

“What?” Tyrone said.

“I mean, your sister, did you go see her the last few hundred years, when you were, um, disconnected?”

“Not really,” she said. “All people kind of flow into each other when I get like that.”

“Alright, so it won’t matter if you wait a little more.” She still looked dubious, so he explained. “It won’t even be that long for you, just a few decades, practically nothing in the long run, but… don’t worry about her for a while. Come with us to the academy tomorrow. Take a few classes; it shouldn’t be too hard with all you know, even if you do have some holes in your knowledge. Make some friends, get a better job, make a life here, as a human, and don’t worry about her.”

“And if you still think she’s important once that’s all said and done,” Woy said, “you can go see her then. You’ve literally got all the time in the world. There’s no hurry.”

“I can just… stop seeing her?” she asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Cor answered. “If nothing else, take a few hundred years break, see if it doesn’t feel less suffocating then.”

She was quiet for a long time, staring into her cup.

Then, slowly, she began to relax.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe I will. Just for a bit, mind.”


	12. Cleaning Out the Trunk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been wanting to write this for a while. It's not great, but here it is.

“Who wants to help me clear out the trunk of the Car?”

Thomas blinked and looked up at his girlfriend standing in the door.

“Depends,” Maria immediately answered from the couch. “How much work are we talking here?”

“I don’t know,” Elisha said. “I haven’t actually opened it yet, but I think it might be bigger inside than outside. I honestly don’t know what I’ll find in there.”

“I’ll help out,” Eddy said, crumpling up an empty bag of chips and throwing it into the trash can. “No problem.”

“Of course we will,” Thomas said getting up.

“Yeah, might even be interesting.” Maria grabbed onto Brad as she walked past and pulled him along.

“Oh, alright,” he said. “Sure, I’ll help out. I don’t see why we can’t do this while Tyrone’s around, though?”

“Not gonna happen.” Elisha led the small procession back towards where the Car stood parked. “It doesn’t like him very much. He’d just make things worse.”

They all stood around and watched as she readied to open the trunk with a certain kind of anticipation. For all the beat up old wreck looked like it should have ended its life in a scrap yard centuries ago, no one ever quite knew what to expect from it. Brad had a nasty feeling someone might end up cursed.

She struggled with the latch for a second, but after a few soothing words and a bit of force, it clicked open. She opened it all the way up and stepped back so they could all see.

“Well,” she said. “I don’t think we have to worry about storage space ever again.”

“Yeah, no,” Thomas answered, looking at the sizable room cluttered up with all kinds of trash. “We’ll just need to tidy it up a bit, probably.”

Elisha clapped her hands together. “Yes. Let’s get to it.”

With that, they moved back in and started pulling things out.

For the most part, it was trash. Broken umbrellas, empty bottles and boxes, old wrapping paper, small pieces of what looked like bone or horn, unidentifiable scraps of somethings, and a thick layer of dust and sand. In between the garbage however, there were a few more intact things.

“Hey, these are kind of pretty,” Eddy called out as he dug out a stack of empty picture frames. “Think they might be worth anything?”

“You know,” Elisha said from somewhere within the depths of the trunk. “A lot of these thigs have been here for a really long time. They might have some worth only based on that. Try not to throw anything away unless you’re completely sure it’s just trash.”

“Not sure how much this could be worth, though,” Brad said, rifling through the contents of an ancient suitcase. “Like, this seems to be just old children’s drawings. Kinda creepy, actually.”

“How about this?” Maria asked, pulling something out into the light.

She was having a bit of trouble, so Thomas lent her a hand. “Is that a tree?” he asked.

“Yup, looks like it,” she said. “A tree in a pot. Wonder how long it’s been in here. Kinda surprising it’s still alive.”

“Really?” He looked dubious. “It looks pretty dead to me.”

The five of them spent the next minute trying to figure out whether or not the ugly little tree was still alive, concluding only that they had no idea.

“Maybe it’s undead,” Elisha suggested.

Brad instantly let go of the twig he was investigating and shook his hands.

“…yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Thomas said. “Let’s just get back to work.”

The next thing they found was a lot of bones, all seemingly different ages, with some looking almost fresh and others old and crumbling to pieces, but they were all piled up in a neat pile. The smallest of them looked like they belonged to a rodent of some kind, small enough to break between their fingertips, while the largest ones were easily identifiable as elephant bones from the skull they came with. The most disturbing ones, though, were the ones that were undeniably human.

“Well,” Maria said. “At least they’re old. I doubt anyone’s still missing them.”

Brad whimpered from the corner. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Thomas took pity on him. He had after all been the one to stumble and all face-first into the pile. “Then why don’t you go get us something to drink while we work. We’re still not even halfway done.”

Brad gave him a grateful look and quickly left, and the rest of them went back to sorting through the trash.

The next few things they found was a basket full of boxes of cutlery, several expensive-looking vases, which on closer examination turned out to be cheap replicas, fourteen kilo-packets of some strange, white powder, and an actual safe, hidden behind stacks upon stacks of empty tape rolls. They were afraid the safe would turn out to be impossible to crack, but the door swung open once they finally managed to inch it out of the trunk, and revealed the contents of the safe to be nothing but leaves. Leaves and a few pretty rocks.

“That was disappointing,” Maria said. “They could at least have left us some stacks of cash or something, but no, they were apparently really fond of leaves.”

“Look on the bright side,” Eddy said, surprising no one. “At least we’re almost done. And the only heavy thigs left seems to be those benches.”

“I think they’re church pews, actually,” Thomas remarked. “About a dozen of them. Though I can’t say I’ve ever seen any like that outside of pictures. They’re all the way in the back, too. They might’ve been here for a very long time.”

“So has these cans of mushrooms,” said Maria, holding up some canned mushroom from a pile by the wall. “They went out of date five hundred years ago!”

“Oh, ew,” Thomas said. “I don’t think we can sell those as antiques.”

Elisha smiled. “You never know. Can’t hurt to try.”

“Hey guys,” Eddy said from somewhere under the church pews. “What’s a bloodstone circle?”

“Hell if I know,” Thomas said. “Why do you ask?”

“Cause the last thing under here is a do-it-yourself bloodstone circle kit from about a thousand years ago.”

“Well, at least we’re done,” said Elisha. “Let’s go back and figure out what to do with these things.”

\---

Thomas was bored.

After throwing out the trash and sorting most of the stuff they had found, Elisha decided to photograph and catalogue the things they might sell for money, and then see if she could get in touch with potential buyers. Meanwhile, Thomas had volunteered to drop by the university’s chemistry department with a sample of the white powder to see if they could figure out what it was.

This was why he now sat on a chair with nothing to do, waiting for the results.

He looked up at the sound of a door opening, and saw the chemistry professor walking towards him. She looked uncharacteristically concerned.

“I’m assuming,” she said, “that since you came to me with this, you don’t know what it is.”

He blinked a few times, confused. “Well, yeah. That’s why I came. You figured it out?”

“Oh yes,” she said, adopting an obviously fake light tone. “It’s known as diamorphine in official settings. More commonly it’s known as pure heroin.”

“What?” He gaped at her, making the exclamation before his brain had the time to catch up with his mouth. “You mean I have fourteen kilos of heroin in my house?”

Her expression went hard, and she crossed her arms across her chest. The chemistry professor had dealt with all kinds of people during her fifty years at her job, and Thomas knew she was not someone he could talk down if he needed to.

“Do I have to worry about this?” she asked.

“Uh, no. Not at all, ma’am,” he said. “I’m the one who needs to worry about this. It’s not that bad! We’ll just get rid of it. I think everyone involved with it is long since dead, anyways.”

She raised an eyebrow, and he inwardly groaned. _Good going, Thomas. Dig yourself deeper while you’re at it, won’t you?_

“Not like that, I promise. I mean, we just found it. I think it’s been there for a while.”

She pinned him with a glare for a few more seconds before she sighed. “Be glad I know you’re not the type, Doctor Strange. Now please get out of my department and go fix your drug problem.”

He sighed in relief and did as she said.

\---

Elisha looked up from her computer when he walked in. “Hey. So, I got to talk to someone about those church pews.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, not really listening. “Uh, I figured out what that stuff was.”

“Yes?” she said. “Are you alright?”

“It’s pure heroin, apparently,” he said.

Every person in the room looked towards the innocent-looking packets in the corner.

“Huh, cool,” Maria said. “Hey, if you decide to be drug dealers, I’ll help you out, alright.”

“We’re no gonna sell it!” Thomas said. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do with it, but we’re not selling it.”

Elisha just looked. “That’s two million dollars, right there.”

Now everyone looked at her. She looked back.

“What?” she said. “It is.”

“Wait,” Brad said. “How do _you_ know the street price of heroin?”

She slowly leaned her head back and gave him the driest look either of them had ever seen on her face, and then she raised an eyebrow, as if to say, how do you _think_ I know it.

“Two million dollars,” Thomas whispered, sitting heavily down in a chair. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Technically, it’s more, but unless you want to sell it on the streets yourself, you have to go through a middleman, so you won’t get more than two mill. And even that relies on finding a buyer who won’t just stab you for it.”

“…could you?” he asked, slightly worried about the answer.

She shrugged. “Maybe. I know a guy. I haven’t seen him since high school, but unless he’s died in the meantime, he would probably be willing to take it off our hands. I thought you weren’t going to sell it, though?”

“Uh,” he said. “No. I mean, we can’t. It’s too risky.”

“That it is,” she said. “There’s never any guarantee we won’t get mixed up with the wrong kind of people.”

“And it’s illegal. Like, very illegal. We’d probably get caught and end up in jail.”

“Very likely, yes.”

“Not to mention extremely unethical.”

“Yes, Thomas. I’m agreeing with you.” She smiled at him. “You don’t have to convince me.”

“…two million dollars, though.”

“And you’d never forgive yourself if you sold it.” She got up and stood in front of him. “You’d never be able to enjoy money you got that way, I know that. I might not care that much myself, but I won’t let you do anything you’d regret. So. We’re not selling it.”

He looked up at her and smiled back. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I just… that’s a lot of money.”

“I know. But really, we don’t need that much. We probably wouldn’t know how to handle it anyways.”

“Aww,” Maria said from the couch. “I wanted to see you become drug dealers.”

“Well, you won’t,” Elisha said. “Very sorry. Now, it’s kind of late and we have some things to talk about.”

“Are you telling us to get out of your house?” Eddy asked.

“Yes, basically,” she said.

“Hey,” Thomas said. “It’s technically still my house. You have your own apartment.”

“And I haven’t stayed there at all for the last three months, which is actually part of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Well, we can take a hint,” Maria said. “It _is_ late, after all. Let’s go, guys. Don’t become drug dealers without telling me!”

With that, they left, leaving Thomas and Elisha alone again in the room. She, as usual, looked like she had not a care in the world, while he tried very hard not to look at the stack of drugs in the corner.

“So,” he said. “What did you want to talk about?”

She sat down on the couch and opened her laptop again, dropping a bit of the public façade now that there was only the two of them. “Well,” she said, “it might not be two million, but I’ve talked to someone about the church pews, and it seems like I’ll be able to get quite a nice sum of money for them. If we add that to what I could potentially get for the rest of the stuff, I mean, we don’t know for sure yet how much it’ll be worth, but there’s no reason to be pessimistic, there might be enough money there for me to do a little something I’ve been wanting to for a while. Especially if I say up the lease on the apartment.”

“You’re asking to move in with me, officially?” he asked, sitting down beside her.

She have him a side-glance. “What, you’re saying no?”

“Of course not. I’d love that. What do we do about the drugs, though?”

“Well, I figure, we don’t have any use for it ourselves, but it’s still worth quite a bit. Think Tyrone might be up for buying it?”

He laughed at that. “Knowing him, sure. He’d probably like it in his tea for breakfast.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. She clicked through a few of her tabs on the computer. “I’ll have an appraiser over next week to look at the stuff, and we can see how much I can get for it then.”

He nodded. “That sounds good. I’m wondering, though. What was it you wanted to do with it?”

She sighed and leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes. “Do you remember our first date?” she said.

“What,” he said. “You mean the one where I dragged you along to a movie you didn’t want to see, generally acted like an awkward idiot for several hours, and you still agreed to go out with me for some reason?”

She cracked a smile. “That’s the one. You asked me what I did for a living, and I told you I wanted to open my own hairdressing salon at one point, remember?”

He thought back. “Yeah, I think I remember that. You want to try?”

She opened her eyes. “It’ll be risky,” she said. “I can’t promise it’ll go well, and it’ll be a lot of hard work, but yes, if I can get enough money from this to get a decent start, I want to try. Are you okay with that?”

He grabbed her hand beside her, and smiled at her when she looked at him. “Of course,” he said. “If anyone can do that, you can. If that’s what you want to do, I say you do it.”

She smiled at him. A rare, completely unguarded smile. Then she sat up and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I will. Now, I have some work ahead of me, I think.” Then she gave his hand a squeeze before she untangled it from hers and went back to her laptop.

He stayed sitting beside her, watching, and wondering if maybe it was about time he bought her a ring.


	13. The Inevitable Hogwarts AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm basically just writing whatever the hell I want for these things. Today you get a crossover featuring my favourite characters. I had way too much fun with this.
> 
> If you want to know more about the particulars of this AU, you need only ask.

Elisha was not muggleborn. Not really. There was magic on both sides of her family, it could just be hard to tell sometimes.

Her father was pureblood, she was reasonably sure. He was also a squib and she had a feeling that was why she had never met his parents. In honesty, she only learned that they were indeed magical when she was ten, because before that he had never once spoken of them, or showed any sign of knowing more about the magical world than her mother.

Her mother was a witch, just like her uncle was a wizard. Their father again had been a wizard, or possibly still was, but no one in the family had kept track of him after he divorces Elisha’s muggle grandmother and left, never to be seen again, so Theodora and Bartholomew were raised as muggles until their respective Hogwarts letters.

After her graduation, and meeting and marrying her husband, Dora practically stopped doing magic. Elisha could count on one hand the times she had really seen her mother cast a spell. Most magic she ever saw done during her childhood happened while Bart was babysitting her, which did happen quite often, all things considered.

So for all intents and purposes, Elisha was practically a muggleborn, almost a newcomer to the magical world, and when she did start her Hogwarts career at eleven, it became clear that her magical talent was also mediocre. She worked as hard as anyone, and could recite most of the important theory well enough to pass the theoretical tests with flying colours, but once it came to actual, magical work, she simply did not have that much power to work with.

She should have been eaten alive in Slytherin.

She was not.

It took her house-mates a few weeks at most to realize that this girl truly belonged in their house, and that any attempts to mess with her were doomed to fail, one way or another. Either way, attitudes were better now than they had been decades ago.

She did not thrive, but she survived.

\---

Tyrone Evergreen was an enigma wrapped up in a mystery wrapped up in a weird, teenage Ravenclaw boy with more talent than any human being had any rights to have.

Most of the students assumed that he was either muggleborn or had moved in from some foreign country, if only because no one anywhere seemed to know where he came from. Most of the teachers were wondering if he was actually human and all, and if not, how he had ended up on their list.

Whether or not he had any actual family was hard to tell. The only one he ever mentioned was a boy five years younger than him who everyone assumed was his little brother without explicitly being told. The few friends he had reported that visiting his home yielded a mostly empty apartment, a little shit of a little brother, and Tyrone being inexplicably good at cooking dinner on his own.

Tyrone spent his days creeping people out, doing feats of magic others considered impossible with an insultingly casual ease, and more or less failing at social interaction. It was common knowledge that if it had not been for Thomas Strange, Tyrone would not have had any friends at all.

Thomas was another Ravenclaw boy, who was considered the most talented wizard in his year mostly because Tyrone did not really count, just barely outdoing Slytherin’s Elizabeth Adams in the grades department.

He had proper, hardworking talent, and would have been a model student if he did not also have an unhealthy fascination with the dark arts.

Not like he wanted to use them, or wanted to hurt people in any way. People who knew him all agreed that Thomas was a good person at heart. He just liked the idea of the darker sides of magic, of blood-driven hexes, ancient eldritch rituals, and dark curses. The rest of his group of friends, consisting of Maria and Brad from Gyffindor and Eddy the friendly Hufflepuff, hypothesized that this was why he fell into Tyrone’s orbit. Or why Tyrone fell into his orbit, they were not really sure.

The point is, they were friends, and Thomas was likely the only person in the school who knew any particulars about what exactly Tyrone was, beside insanely-poweful-wizard-who-might-or-might-not-actually-be-a-wizard. Of course, the particular in question were only ‘definitely not human, but probably won’t kill us all when he’s done here,’ but he figured there was no reason to tell anyone that. Besides, he liked Tyrone. For some reason.

\---

Once, when Elisha was in her second year, she found herself wandering the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the night, alone.

The night was colder than she expected, so she drew her coat tighter around herself and walked faster, ducking between the trees without really watching them. She was there on a dare, originally. She was just supposed to go in, walk around for five minutes and come right back out again, but she regretted the decision to do it almost immediately, and now she was lost.

She lost the trail disturbingly quickly, and then her wand-light went out and she could not manage to light it again. In the darkness under the canopy on a cloudy night, she could barely see her hands in front of her face, and finding the trail again was a distant dream. Still, she pulled her coat around herself and walked on, determined to get out somehow, knowing that panicking would hardly help.

It was still hard to keep from panicking.

After a while, she found something between the trees that felt like a trail, straight and deep over the roots, and she let out a small breath of relief and followed it. After several minutes of carefully making her way along the track, she heard a sound.

It was a strange sound, somewhere between the continuous roar of a large animal and something large rolling down a hill. It grew louder and louder as she walked, and she froze in the pitch-black darkness as she realized that whatever it was, it was headed towards her.

A few moments later, there was a light as well, also headed towards her and growing brighter.

She shivered from fear and the cold, shielding her eyes against the sudden light, and pressed herself against the trunk of the nearest tree, hoping that the approaching creature would pass her by without notice. The noise grew to a deafening roar, and then it stopped.

Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the bright light.

The thing standing before her was a car.

Or, it had been a car at some point. Now, it was covered in dirt, plants and fungi, until there was almost nothing left to be seen of the original paint job. Some kind of old model, her brain noted automatically. Probably a ford.

She took a careful step away from the tree. The beams from the headlights followed her.

There was no one in the front seat, she noted. The car was driving itself.

She reached out a shaking hand and touched the nose of the car. It settled a little lower on its wheels, seemingly not minding the contact.

“Um,” she said, nervously. “Do you know the way back to school?”

She felt a little silly talking to a car. She had no guarantee it could understand her. On the other hand, she was lost, and the car had found her on its own.

Nothing happened for several seconds, and then the door on the driver’s side creaked open an inch.

She hesitated just a second before she ran around and pulled it open the rest of the way, ignoring the sound of snapping roots as she did, and got in. She closed the door behind her and the car immediately started driving again.

She tried to get comfortable. The seats were rotted and moist, and the whole car smelled of dirt and moss, but the interior was slightly warmer than the outside and there was no wind, and she was also not lost anymore. The car drove between the trees with a confident certainty.

Almost no time at all afterwards, they drove through an opening between the trees, and the familiar visage of the castle appeared before the dirty windshield. Elisha got out and stood on shaking legs on the grass, the last bit of heavy anxiety dissolving in her chest.

“Thank you so much,” she said to the car. “I’ll- I’ll come back and clean your windows or something, later, if you want?”

The car, which had been about to leave, paused and blinked its headlights at her a few times, which she assumed meant that it would like that, and then it drove off. She watched it go, and then she ran back to the castle, hoping very hard that no one important had noticed she was gone.

\---

“You’re not human, are you?” was the question that truly solidified Thomas as Tyrone’s best friend.

They were in fourth year, had been good friends for almost two years, and Tyrone sat in a secluded corner of their common room, reading some old book from the restricted section of the library, when Thomas approached him and asked.

“What?” Tyrone looked up from the book, surprised. “What gave you that idea?”

Thomas pulled a chair over so he could sit beside him. “I overheard some teachers talking. Some of them don’t believe you can be, simply because of what you do in class. I think most of them think you’re either just insanely talented or have found some way to cheat, but some of them think there’s something more behind it, and…” He looked down at his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw Tyrone regarding him with a guarded kind of apprehension, face carefully blank, but the forced calm of his posture betrayed his emotion. “And I know that some of the stuff you do almost casually when it’s just you and me is leagues above what you show in class,” he finished.

Tyrone found a bookmark and closed his book, giving Thomas his full attention. “So what do you think I am?” he asked. “Despite the activism, the school still doesn’t teach non-human students, you know?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I just know you’re something else than you pretend to be. I just… I wanted to let you know that I’m your friend. You don’t have to lie to me.”

Tyrone chewed his cheeks for a minute. “Is it really important?”

“I suppose not,” Thomas said. “I’d still like to know, though. You’re not denying it?”

Tyrone shrugged. “Wouldn’t be a point. Are you sure we’ll still be friends despite this, though?”

“Unless you’re actually planning to kill someone or something, yeah,” Thomas said, unintentionally leaning closer.

Tyrone hesitated a little longer, and then he nodded, mostly to himself, and put a hand on Thomas’ forehead.

Suddenly, Thomas felt like he had stepped out of reality. The chattering voices from the common room and the light and warmth from the fireplace all disappeared, leaving behind a cool, dark, pressing silence. The space around him was filled with something, he could tell, but it was so far outside the parameters of his own experience that he could only barely sense it. He felt a trace of a vast, deep presence, a power that would reduce him to dust and memories with a thought, and the weight of more time that he was capable of understanding.

And then it was over. He was back in the bright and now almost painfully loud common room. Tyrone removed his hand from his forehead.

“Oh,” he said, voice shaking. “Oh, okay then. Um. You- You promise you’re not actually here to kill anyone?”

Tyrone nodded. “I promise. I really just wanted to try out school for a change, is all.”

“Okay. All right then,” Thomas said. He was being only somewhat successful at getting his voice under control. “Just never do that again and we’re good.”

“Good.” Tyrone smiled, and picked his book back up.

Thomas sat back in his chair and wondered whether the infirmary would have anything against existential dread.

\---

When Elisha was in third year, she snuck out on one of her now quite frequent visits to the forest, and found that her car was in trouble.

Over the last few weeks, she had noticed the derelict old vehicle moving a little slower than usual. She brushed it off as probably no big deal, but now it was less than half the speed it usually used and one of the wheels seemed not to move at all. A closer examination showed a net of purplish blue root-like things spreading through the flora covering the car.

None of her attempts to remove the roots did anything at all. It was clear that what she really needed was the help of someone who knew what they were doing. Her first instinct was to ask the Care of Magical Creatures teacher or the Herbology teacher. She liked Herbology. She was good at it. It required only manual skill and knowledge, and little magical talent.

She quickly realized that going to a teacher would be a bad idea. It would gain her detention for a year, for breaking the rules so often, and would probably not help the car at all. She needed to talk to someone with a lot of magical talent and little care for the rules. When she said it like that, it was obvious what she had to do. She had to talk to the creepiest fifth-year in the school. She had to talk to Tyrone Evergreen.

\---

Thomas was quite honestly not sure how to react to the cute little Slytherin third-year who approached them after class because she needed to talk to Tyrone. It was not unusual for people to ask him out to help them study, or to actually ask him out, for some reason, but the way she was acting this did not seem like either of those.

When Tyrone convinced her that Thomas should hear what was up as well, and they found and empty classroom for her to explain that she was tending to a feral car out in the forest, he still did not know what to think.

He did know it meant he would have to come with them, just to make sure no one got themselves killed.

Either way, this was how he ended up in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night, standing beside a girl he hardly knew, in front of the most beat-up car he had seen in his life, while Tyrone did something neither of them understood and rambled something about enchantment-eating mycorrhiza or something. At some point during the night, they got to talking.

Elisha showed up at his table in the library the next day and asked him to help her study for her next Transfiguration test, because she had no idea what was going on and she was scared she might fail, and they kept talking.

(He fell for her within the week. She liked him as a friend, but he was not quite her type, so she graciously ignored it. She dated quite a number of people through her first few years of school, and he got over the crush, enjoying the friendship instead. At least he claimed so.)

(She came back from summer break to start fifth year having ran through a significant growth spurt, and was suddenly regarded as one of the prettiest girls in school. His crush came back with a vengeance.)

(She also came back from that summer break with a few experiences she never spoke of to anyone, but whatever it was, it changed her outlook quite a bit.)

(She asked him out three months before he graduated at the top of his class, and never once looked back.)

\---

When Tyrone hit sixth year, the number of Evergreens in school doubled.

His so-called little brother Alvie confused the hat for almost four minutes before he was bewilderingly sorted into Hufflepuff, and the school was never quite the same.

Every student in the school knew the stories of the Weasley twins, and how they played pranks that became legendary. Throughout the years, many tried to replicate, or even surpass them. Alvie managed to do so within three months.

He flooded the entire second floor. Not in the sense that the floor was wet, but in the sense that students and teachers walked up the stairs to meet a solid ceiling of water, floating at floor-level, and walked down from the third to meet a floor of the same. The students having class on the second floor at the time noticed nothing before class ended and they opened the door to a wall of water, with a few small fish swimming past through the corridors.

It took the teachers two months to figure out how to remove it, and they never figured out how it had been done.

He switched the names around on every assignment handed in for every class in the school during his first six months of second year. The chaos was absolute. Not a single student got through that year with every assignment correctly graded.

No one could figure out how he did it, or how it was even possible to do. Nothing anyone did to prevent it helped, and nothing they did could prove that he was the one to do it.

That was the worst part, in the end. They knew Alvie was the one to do it. It could be no one else, but there was also no possible way it could be him. They questioned him and tested him and gave him months of detention, and through it all he just grinned and rearranged their drawers while they looked away.

“What, you _made_ him?” Thomas asked, incredulous, when Tyrone explained what exactly his ‘little brother’ was.

“Yep,” Tyrone said. “I wanted to see if I could. I think it turned out reasonably well all things considered. I mean, he’s practically human.”

“Sure,” Thomas said, and waved to where Alvie pranced through the corridor towards them. “If by human you mean the living incarnation of chaos.”

“And that is all I ever wanted,” Tyrone answered.


	14. Five Ways Dipper Sterling Could Have Remembered

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exactly what it says on the box.

So, we all love Return, Rewind, Rewrite, right? Like, really love it. It’s a great story.

We have to admit, though, that it takes a lot of coincidences for it to work. While we can easily forgive this for the sake of the narrative, it does also make room for quite a few ‘what if’s.

What if Lionel never found that very special book at an auction that one time?

So, here: Five other ways Dipper Sterling could find out he was Alcor the Dreambender.

What if… there was an incident?

Lionel Sterling could not for the life of him understand why this was happening. He stared down the barrel of a gun held by a man much larger than him, and tried to find a way out of this situation that did not involve anyone being shot.

Around them, two other men were in the process of turning Lionel’s living room inside out looking for something, and yet another man had gone up the stairs. He held a faint hope that the man would let the children stay sleeping in their beds, but it was only a very faint one.

“Why are you doing this?” he tried asking the man with the gun. “We don’t have anything worth taking, I swear.”

The man regarded him indifferently for a while, and just when Lionel became sure he would not get an answer, he shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “All I know is the boss thinks you’ve got something big hidden here somewhere, and he wants it. I don’t know why he thinks that, but he asked us to get it, so we will. If we can’t find it, you can tell him where it is yourself.”

“But I don’t _know_ anything,” Lionel insisted.

The man shrugged, as if to say, that’s your problem, not mine.

“Daaad, what’s going on?” Belle’s voice came down the stairs, and Lionel’s stomach dropped.

“Kids! Are you alright?”

“You mean aside from the giant man with a gun?” Dipper answered. “We’re good, I guess.”

Said man with a gun came around the corner, holding one child in each hand. They were still in their pyjamas and looked scared and confused, but they also looked reasonably unharmed. Lionel drew a tentative breath of relief.

“Okay,” he said. “Kids, I don’t know what’s going on exactly, but as long as we do what these people ask, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be alright.”

Dipper looked dubious, for good reason considering his dad was tied to a chair, but Belle nodded. She looked like she was on the verge of crying.

“No, it won’t,” the first man said. The one who had a gun pointed at Lionel’s face. He seemed like the leader of the little group of… mercenaries? They looked a little military-like. “Nothing is going to be alright unless you give us what we came here for.”

“But I don’t. Know. What. You’re. Talking about,” Lionel reiterated. The man moved the gun an inch closer. “I really don’t. We don’t have anything of that kind of value in the house! You must have the wrong place.”

Belle shook quietly against the grip hat held her. Tears were threatening to spill from her eyes. Dipper just stood with a determined resolve no child his age should ever have to muster.

Lionel felt his hear clench, but there was still nothing he could do. He had never felt this helpless. Not ever.

“Alright then,” the leader-man said, lowering his gun a smidge, and Lionel knew too well not to take it as a surrender. “I suppose we’ll just have to refresh your memory a little, then. Johnson,” He pointed at one of the men. “Shoot the girl.”

“NO!”

Lionel chocked on too many things to say a word. Luckily, Dipper’s pained scream summed his thoughts up nicely. Belle struggled valiantly, but the man named Johnson easily overpowered her and drew his gun. Dipper kept shouting.

“NO! Don’t you dare! Don’t you- I- I’ll bite you! I’ll curse your grandchildren! I’ll find out where you live and burn your fucking house down, don’t you dare!”

Johnson… actually paused. He looked over at where Dipper was trying very hard to twist around and bite his captor’s hand. “Can’t someone shut that kid up?” he asked.

The leader-man gave a nasty grin. It was the first real expression he had shown since the moment he kicked in their door, and Lionel did not like it at all. “No, no, the kid has spunk,” he said. “I like that. Let’s give him what he wants. Leave the sister alone. Shoot the boy instead.”

“No. No please,” Lionel begged. “I legitimately don’t know what you’re looking for! If I did, I’d give it to you. No question, I promise, so please-” but it was no help.

A horrifying bang silenced both his begging and Belle's quiet sobs.

Dipper stopped fighting, slumped against his captor, and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes when they let him go.

The leader-man said something. Possibly more threats or more questions as to the location of this mysterious artefact they were trying to find, but Lionel could not hear him. He was too busy trying to remember how to breathe.

A pool of blood started spreading across the floor.

The leader-man walked between Lionel and his son, cutting off his view, and kept asking questions. Then he apparently decided it was pointless and gave his men orders to keep searching the house.

Belle’s shout of “Dipper! Are you alright?” seemed to restart time.

“Don’t be silly, girl,” Johnson said. “The kid’s… dead.”

Except Dipper was getting up again.

His limbs seemed not to be cooperating, it took him a long time to push himself into a sitting position with a hand pressed against his forehead, and blood seeped out from beneath his fingers and ran down his face, but he was definitely moving.

“…the fuck?”

Every head in the room was turned towards Dipper.

“Yeah,” he said with a lopsided smile, answering Belle. “Aside from being shot in the head, I’m perfectly fine.”

“What the fuck, kid? You were dead. I know you were dead. I felt your heart stop!”

Dipper looked up at where Johnson had his gun pointed at him. He removed the hand from his forehead and showed off the neat little bullet-hole in it. “Yep,” he said. Then he patted his chest. “No heartbeat. I’d call it a great shot, but it was point-blank, so it really isn’t that impressive. Bullet lost most of its piercing power on the initial hit, so it didn’t get all the way through, just shattered and ricocheted around in my skull. My brain is basically mush now.”

Dipper tilted his head to the side and crossed his eyes. A small trickle of blood ran out of his ear. No one in the room dared say anything.

He pushed off the floor to get back on his legs, immediately stumbled, and had to lean on a table.

“Wooh,” he said. “My balance is shot. I guess that’s what happens when your inner ear fills with blood, huh.”

“Dipper?” Belle asked. “What’s going on?”

He gave her an apologetic look. “Right, sorry. Just remembering some things I forgot. Didn’t mean to worry you or anything.” He looked down at his hand and sighed. “Dammit, and I liked this body.”

“Fuck it. Shoot him dead,” the leader-man said.

Every mercenary in the room raised their gun. Dipper raised a hand.

Screaming filled the room as every single gun melted, and burned right through the hands that held them.

Dark cracks ran across Dipper’s skin, starting at the bullet hole in his head and running down his whole body. Then the skin started peeling away and flaking off, leaving skin so black it looked like a hole in the world.

A man started running towards the door. Dipper moved a hand and he dropped, motionless.

Lionel realized the ropes binding him were broken, so he ran over to where Belle still stood, got on his knees and checked her over, just to make sure she was okay. When he was done, only one of the mercenaries still moved.

The leader-man looked at the creature that had been Dipper with pure terror in his eyes. Dipper, for his part, landed on the floor. He had been floating, apparently. The faint glowing lines pulsing through his skin grew brighter, and a second later, he looked almost like Dipper again.

His clothes were different. The pyjamas still lay in a bloody heap on the floor, Lionel realized, and instead he wore slacks and a white shirt that would look strange on any child, let alone Dipper. His pupils were slitted like a cat’s, his ears were pointed and his fingers ended in claws. There was a hint of fangs behind his unamused smile, and he walked towards the shivering man with a deadly purpose.

“Are you still alive?” he asked.

The man nodded frantically.

“Good,” Dipper said. He kneeled down and took a hold of the man’s chin in a hand. “I have a message for you to give your boss from me. Can you do that?”

The man nodded again.

“Great.” Dipper grinned. There was no humour in it and far too many fangs. “Here it is. _‘Run’_.”

With that, he let go, and the man scrambled to his feet and ran out the door, cradling his hand.

Dipper stood up and turned around to face his family. Lionel was relieved to see that he looked a lot less secure now.

Hard as it was to admit, he did not know how he would react to Dipper turning that grin on him.

“Dipper,” Belle said. “What is going on?”

Dipper looked around at the men laying strewn around the room and winced. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I owe you guys an explanation.”

What if… puberty was hell?

When they turned thirteen, Dipper’s body stopped working right.

It had never worked perfectly, what with the nightmares and the weak immune system and the weird magic allergy, but after their thirteenth birthday, things got worse.

It started with a cold. It continued with another cold, immediately after the first, and a steadily growing headache that never seemed to leave, and then he realized Belle was taller than him, and he seemed not to be catching up. And then he got another cold, segueing rapidly into a full-blown flu.

They thought that was as bad as it would get. They were wrong.

The schoolyear they were thirteen, Dipper lost a month of classes altogether. He hardly grew at all, maybe a centimetre at most, he caught every cold and flu that was going around, sniffling through even the good days, and his strange headaches acted up more often than not.

The year they were fourteen, he started growing again. He shot up so fast his body could not keep up, his skin stretched thin over his bones and even ripped a time or two, leaving large open sores. He got two large infections and a regular bed at the hospital.

The year they were fifteen, a day when he only coughed up a little blood was a good one. A bad day was one where he had to stay in the hospital because they were scared his lungs would become too clogged for him to breathe. The growing pains came back in fits and starts until he could only wish he would stop growing entirely.

The year they were sixteen, he flatlined for a minute in the middle of the night, with his father sleeping in a chair beside his bed.

The monitor went back to a steady heartbeat before anyone could come.

After the nurses had stopped fussing over him, he lay back on his bed, staring at the ceiling and mentally kicking himself.

His dad and his sister did not deserve being put through that shit just because he made a stupid mistake.

He honestly considered editing their memories just so he would never have to explain that he honestly forgot that he had no template for human growth past the age of twelve.

What if… the cult was a lot less insane?

“Kid, wait! You have something I’ve been looking for.”

“What?” Dipper looked dubiously up at the woman who had approached him while he was walking home from school. “Are you talking to me?”

The woman caught up to him and nodded, catching her breath from the run. She had a very happy smile on her face. “Yes,” she said. “I realize this seems a little strange, but will you hear me out?”

“I suppose...” he said, spotting a bench. “We can sit over there?”

She beamed at him. “Of course!” she said. “I am Agnes, by the way. Thank you so much for hearing me out on this.”

“Right.” He sat down at the edge of the bench, ready to run if he had to, but she sat with a respectful distance to him, so he relaxed a little. “So, what was it you wanted?”

She drew a deep breath, as if starting a speech she had pre-prepared. “I represent a group that is looking for a certain special someone, and has been for some time. After a close investigation, we have come to the conclusion that you have a high chance of being the person we are looking for, and it is our goal to help you realize your full potential.”

Dipper raised an eyebrow. “That sounds really vague. How do I know if that’s something I’d want? For all I know you’re planning to hurt me.”

“Of course,” she said. “I can assure you that if you are not the person we’re looking for, the process will not do a thing to you. We have tested it several times and no one has even noticed anything. And if you are the one we’re looking for, it _can’t_ do anything bad to you. It is literally designed to put you in touch with your own unrealized power.”

“So you’re going to give me magic powers?” Dipper asked, one eyebrow raised.

“Basically yes,” Agnes said. “We only want what’s best for you, I promise.”

“But I’m no good with magic,” Dipper said, trying to hide the longing in his voice. This was weird. This was a strange lady approaching him on the street for no apparent reason, he should be weirded out… but he had always wanted magic powers of some kind, and it was hard to say no to someone offering.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “That is to be expected, considering. It is actually part of why we think it is you to begin with. Please, just come with us, just for a second. I promise we won’t do anything bad to you.”

He chewed on his lip. He really should say no. “Promise I’ll get to go home if I change my mind?”

“Of course,” she said. “We are absolutely going to listen to you throughout the whole process.”

He should say no. He gave her a side-glance. “Alright,” he said. “I’ll see what you’ve got, and then I’ll decide.”

She beamed at him.

Agnes led him to a large, official looking building. Several other, happy-looking people met them inside, and they walked to a room with a conference table with baskets of candy with logos on them. More people sat around the table.

“Wait, you own all this?” Dipper asked.

Agnes laughed a friendly kind of laughter. “No,” she said. “We share the building with a few companies, but we’re very grateful to them for letting us use it for things like this sometimes.”

“Oh.”

Dipper sat down and took a piece of candy. It was good.

All the people there were so friendly, almost deferent. It was strange, but also somewhat familiar in a weird way. He tried to figure out where he could have ever met this many people acting this deferent to him, and came up blank.

The last person present settled at the table.

“So, what now?” Dipper asked.

Everyone looked at Agnes.

“Now, we figured we’d explain to you what’s going to happen, and then we might as well get started. Sound good to you?”

He nodded slowly. “Alright. Um, what _is_ going to happen?”

“Well…” she turned fully towards him and folded her hands in front of her. “We believe, and have good reasons to believe, that you are harbouring a great power within you. While the ritual to bring it forth is perfectly harmless, it can also be slightly unnerving if you go into it unprepared.”

“Wait, ritual? As in, like, cult stuff?” Dipper asked.

The people around the table started looking uncomfortable.

“I can understand that it would look like that, yes,” Agnes said. “Which is why we wanted to walk you through it first. I… admit we got most of the general aesthetic from our previous leader. Before… he… went to jail… for almost murdering a child.”

It was strange to see an adult look so uncomfortable with admitting something to him. If what she had said had been less shocking, he might even have wondered about that.

“What,” he said. “You are not inspiring a lot of trust in me here.”

“Look,” one of the other people at the table said. “We’re the ones who turned him in, okay? The second we realized how off his rocker he was. That doesn’t mean the man’s goals weren’t worthy, his methods were just bonkers, is all. Like Agnes said, our methods are perfectly harmless.”

“And they’ll, what did you say, put me in touch with immense magical power?”

“That is the intent, yes,” Agnes said.

“And if I say that I want to stop and go home instead?”

“You can. At any time.”

“This is probably a bad idea,” Dipper said. He took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

\---

The other room had a ridiculously complicated circle array on the floor.

“This is definitely a bad idea,” Dipper said.

“It’s fine,” Agnes said, kneeling beside him. “The circles can’t hurt you.”

The circles gave him a very bad feeling, was what they did, but he nodded in spite of it, left his backpack at the edge of the room, and started walking towards the middle.

Halfway there, he paused.

“Am I supposed to find this familiar?”

“Yes!” Agnes answered enthusiastically. “That is a very good sign.”

“Alright,” Dipper said, and kept walking. He still had a distinct feeling that he had been in the middle of many such circles before, and that it was rarely a good thing. “I guess… start it up?”

Agnes smiled reassuringly, and then she pulled out a knife.

She must have seen him recoil at the sight of the knife, so she hurriedly explained, “Oh, don’t worry. While definitely no one needs to die for this, the circle still needs blood to activate, and that’s all this is for. It won’t get anywhere near you.”

“So you’re, what, gonna cut across your palm or something?” Dipper asked, still eyeing the knife.

“Oh goodness no. That ruins your hand horribly. I’ll just cut my arm a little, see?”

She pulled her shirt-sleeve up and showed several clear scars across her arm, and then she unhesitatingly cut into it and let blood drip over the circles on the floor.

As she did that, the rest of the people, now spread around the perimeter of the circle, started chanting something.

The pressure started to rise in Dipper’s head. And rise. And rise.

It rose until it turned into a crushing pain, and he shouted, “Stop it!” stumbling back until his back hit a wall that had definitely not been there a few seconds ago.

A moment later, the chanting stopped, and the headache slowly abated. He looked up to see that Agnes had a hand in the air and a foot breaking the outermost circle, and also that he was leaning against a barrier made by the innermost circle. He flinched away from it.

“The hell, Agnes?” someone shouted. “Why’d you stop us? It’s him! It’s the Lord! We could’ve just continued and he’d be free!”

“And have his first new memory be ‘being really angry at us’? Are you insane?”

The faces around the circle looked a little sheepish at that. Agnes turned back towards Dipper.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Am I okay? Am I- What is going on? Who are you talking about? What are you actually trying to do to me?” He inadvertently touched the barrier again and found that it was weakening in pace with the pressure in his skull. He did not want to think about what that meant.

Agnes walked over to him and broke the innermost circle as well, removing the barrier entirely.

“Forgive me,” she said. “Yes, we have not been totally honest with you. The truth is, our Lord disappeared around the same time you would have been born, and we think he might have been bound in human form, which would be you. We are only trying to get him back.”

“Your… Lord? Bound? Disappeared around the same time I was born. Wait.” Dipper might have made a few bad decisions that day, but he could still add two and two together to get a seriously disconcerting answer. “You think I’m a _demon?_ You think I’m _that_ demon.”

He took a few steps back when she did not immediately deny it.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “This is- this is crazy. I can’t- I’m not- I want to go home.”

She nodded, and stepped out of the way so he could get a clear line to the door. Then she held out a hand when he was about to run.

“Wait,” she said.

“I don’t want any more to do with you,” he said.

“Just, a second, I promise.” She dug into one of her pockets and pulled out a card, held it out to him. “My number, if you ever change your mind.”

“I won’t,” he said, but he still took the card, and then he ran home.

\---

Three days later, he sat on his bed with the card in his hand and tried to calm down.

He knew his dad kept a diary, and always had, even though no one ever read them. It had taken a while to dig out the old ones from the basement and un-puzzle the horrible handwriting, but it was worth it.

Throughout all nine months their mother should have been pregnant with him and Belle, there was not once any mention of more than one baby.

The entries after the birth, after their (her) mother’s death, were irregular and confused, but it was still clear as day that he had appeared out of thin air just a little while after Belle was born. Before that point, they had been scared the baby (singular) would die. After that point, the babies (plural) were fine and coming home.

It was so obvious.

He had no idea what to do.

“What’s that? Love letter?” Belle asked, appearing in the door.

“Uh,” Dipper said.

Belle walked over and snatched the card out of his hand. “Wait,” she said. “This is a phone number! Did you get someone’s phone number?”

“Belle! Give that back!”

He reached for the card, but she held it out of his reach.

“Nu-uh,” she said. “Not unless you tell me what’s on your mind. You’ve been all weird lately.”

He looked at her, and then he sighed. “All right,” he said. “But only if you promise not to freak out.”

\---

Agnes’ phone showed an unfamiliar number when it ringed. She immediately picked up to hear a wonderfully familiar voice.

_“Um, hello?”_ it said. _“It’s me. I… was convinced. I’ll do it.”_

What if… the memories came back on their own?

When Dipper was fourteen, the nightmares returned.

Even with the dreamcatcher hanging over his bed like an unwieldy guardian angel, it seems they wanted too hard to get into his head for him to keep them out.

On the other hand, they seemed a little less like nightmares now than they had when he was a child.

There were strange scenes in the dreams. Sometimes they were made of light and laughter, the feeling of tossing a smiling child into the air and catching them again, the taste of candy melting on his tongue, unfamiliar yet familiar faces smiling at him, being exasperated with him, or just talking to him. Sometimes there was darkness and pain, the sound of screaming, the smell of blood. The taste of blood, too, and for some reason, many of those dreams were not inherently scary.

Yes, there was pain, but it was not painful. A part of him woke from those dreams wanting to go back to sleep, the same as when he woke from the bright dreams. The only ones he woke from in a cold sweat now were the ones where the unfamiliar familiar voices were the ones screaming, when their blood was the one on his tongue. Those were luckily few and far between.

He kept quiet about the new dreams. He was reasonably sure none of his family noticed anything was up, and he did not want to worry them. He especially did not want to tell them that he sometimes caught himself wondering if blood would taste as good in real life as it did in the dreams, if screams would sound as sweet. Those thoughts disturbed him more than anything else.

About a year after the first of the new dreams slipped through, he took the dreamcatcher down. He explained to his dad that he wanted to see if the nightmares of his childhood had gone away. In truth, he wanted to see if it made the dreams any more coherent.

It did. The narrative he got while sleeping from there on was strange, but it was more than the random scenes and snippets he had gotten before.

Half a year later, he woke up in the middle of the night and thought, _oh, so that was what it was_.

He decided to keep being Dipper Sterling regardless. After all, no one had noticed yet, and he really liked this life.

Two years later, the memory charm on Lionel wore too thin, and he remembered a few things as well.

He sat in a chair in the living room in the middle of the night, wondering what in the world he was going to do, what he could possibly do to prevent Dipper from potentially leaving them, and a hand descended from behind him, carrying a cup of tea.

He caught the cup and whipped his head around to see Dipper walking around his chair.

“So,” Dipper said. “How long have you remembered?”

Lionel’s heart skipped a beat and he clutched the cup tighter. “How did you know?”

Dipper smiled and let out a breath of laughter, and walked around the small table to settle in the couch on the other side of it. “You would barely look me in the eye all day. It was hardly difficult to figure out.”

“Right. I’m sorry,” he said. He looked down into his cup for a little while, and then he looked up at his more-or-less-adopted son. Dipper had his legs curled up under him on the couch, and was stirring what was probably three spoonfulls of sugar into his tea. He did not look like a very dangerous demon. “Ah, I just remembered this morning. Woke up and there it was.”

Dipper smiled, which was probably a good sign. “Yeah, I know the feeling. One morning it was just, ‘oh right, I’m a demon. Had forgotten about that’. Surprisingly smooth transition when you think about it.”

Lionel took a sip of his tea. It was just normal tea. “You… didn’t always remember, then?” he asked.

“Hah, no,” Dipper answered. “I mean, could you imagine having to pretend to be a baby? Talk about demeaning.”

Lionel laughed with him. The tension was slowly letting up, but it was still there. “You stuck around even after you remembered, then?”

Dipper shrugged and started drinking his over-sweetened cup of what was probably also normal tea. “Of course. I love you guys. Wasn’t just going to leave.”

“Do you’re definitely still staying, then?” he asked. He might have sounded a little too desperate. He did not care.

Dipper laughed. “Wait, _that’s_ what you’re worried about? A high-level demon pretends to be your son for eighteen years, and you’re worried it might stop?”

The last of the tension left him with a great sigh, and he leaned back against the chair. “It sounds so bad when you say it like that,” he said, “but, well, you are my son. You’re just… kind of adopted?”

“Kind of adopted,” Dipper repeated with a smile. “I can live with that.”

Lionel looked at the most powerful demon in the world finish a cup of tea on his couch, and he smiled back.

Two minutes later, he was asleep.

 

What if… he never remembered?

Dipper Sterling had a nice, long life.

He never got married, but he hung around his sister and her wife, and eventually the myriad of his sister’s wife’s sister’s children, enough that he never lacked family.

He grew to be an old man with a vast knowledge of all things magic and no actual ability to use it, and he eventually grew frail and sick.

His friends and family stayed with him after he was admitted to the hospital, taking turns by his bedside to make sure he was never alone, and even as the last of his body failed him, he found he could laugh as he talked about old memories with them.

It was his sister who held his hand and promised she would follow him soon when he finally gave his last breath, and he passed on peacefully, knowing he left a life well lived.

On the other side, Alcor shook his head a few times. Blinked. Sorted through his memories, and then laughed until he cried.

“Wow,” he said. “That was dumb.”

He snickered a little more.

“I should do it again.”


	15. All Cars Go to Heaven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is about the Car. Particularly, [ its far future](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7497429/chapters/17479003). Because everything reincarnates.

That the Car learned to possess other vehicles was not really that surprising, considering the long list of other things it learned to survive over the centuries.

No one could ever find any trace of its original body, and this was no surprise either. At the end of its run, that body was held together only by the powerful spells that now made up the Car’s consciousness, and the second these left it for greener pastures, it exploded into a pile of rust, small pieces of old rubber, splinters of horse bones and cracked obsidian, and very little else.

Of course, these spells and wards were quite hard on the chosen new body.

It was a nice, green SUV, in many ways similar to what the Car itself had once looked like, so many, many years ago. It had, at the point in time where the Car crashed into it and took it over, only a few years of runtime. It was practically new, in fact.

Within a minute of the spirit of the Car jumping ship, the brutal enchantments seeped into the chassis and wore at the seams until they cracked apart.

Still, the Car woke up with a roar, spun its new tires, and felt better than it had for a very long time.

The original owner of the green SUV was rather happy he had taken out insurance for inexplicable supernatural occurrences.

\---

Over the next few hundred years, it jumped from car to car, staying close to what it knew and leaving a pile of broken and worn shrapnel in its wake, because nothing could hold itself together after having that construct in the driver’s seat.

After a while, it started branching out, moving away from that particular kind of car as it realized it could be whatever it could hit.

The military also realized this after a mission to remove a rogue magical vehicle ended with a crash and one of their tanks going out of control.

For its part, the Tank thoroughly enjoyed its new arsenal. It did not enjoy the military freaking out about it quite as much, but it had its fun for almost ten hours before it ran out of bullets, was cornered, and had to escape into a small car at the side of the road.

After this, it started really experimenting.

\---

The Racing Car had a ramming speed that was literally supersonic.

It left a line of scorched and burning rubber whenever it took off, and it was very sad when it turned out this body lasted only a fraction of the time they usually did before it had to switch again.

The general populace had nothing against the wild, speeding bullet disappearing from their roads.

\---

The Train was a nightmare. Not so much for the Train, but for its passengers.

It had originally been a perfectly normal, seven-car passenger train before the Car exploded into its side and it suddenly sped up.

After about three minutes, it had enough of rails, and jumped off the track to run down the main street of a major city.

Trains could usually not turn ninety-degree corners. The Train could.

It was a miracle that they managed to rescue all the passengers before their ride disappeared below the surface of the ocean… only to reappear days later on the other side and causing a panic there as well.

\---

The Bicycle thoroughly regretted its choices.

\---

The Motorbike was a better choice, staying that way for a long time, and spending its days scaring the living daylights out of bikers.

Even long after it moved on to other modes of transportation, bikers in dark bars would, after a few beers, tell the story of the riderless bike that would appear in the dead of night with a mighty roar and chase you down, and you could only hope you would lose it before you ran out of gas.

\---

The Limo had seemed like a good choice at the time.

After all, humans seemed to pay so much respect to limos and their drivers, surely they must be high-quality cars, right?

The Limo found itself slow, unwieldy, and even more annoyed at humanity than usual, which said a lot.

It had dumped its passengers a long time ago, and was now definitely tired of driving around in this body. It could also feel its enchantments eating away at it unusually quickly, possibly in response to its anger, and so it was looking for a more respectable body to switch to.

\---

You would think that a golf cart would not be a more respectable body.

A few days later, three military helicopters being called in to assist in a high-speed car chase down a busy highway would prove you wrong.

The Golf Cart was having fun, but it was also more or less falling apart, and had gotten about what it could out of this body, so it decided to go out with a final jump for glory. This being a literal jump designed to smash it into the side of one of the military helicopters.

The Military Helicopter quickly subdued its opponents, dropped its terrified pilots off at the top of the nearest building, and flew off to enjoy its newfound ability to fly.

There was very little anyone could do about this.

The helicopter was one of those bodies it would sorely miss after it inevitably fell apart.

\---

The Transit Bus was a change of pace, if nothing else because it actually did the job a transit bus was supposed to do. Somewhat.

Every once in a while, someone who had waited at a bus stop for far too long could find an unfamiliar bus pulling up. If they made the mistake of boarding it, they would find there was no driver and usually no other passengers.

The Bus got its passengers exactly where they wanted to go, of course, and faster than any other mode of transportation. Unfortunately, it did this in the particular way special to it.

It did not know that many things, all things considered, but it knew better than anyone that the fastest way from point A to point B was a straight line, regardless of what or who stood in between them.

Despite these idiosyncrasies, there were places it was a very popular school bus.

\---

It enjoyed being the Jumbo Jet almost as much as it had enjoyed being the Helicopter.

While there were few terrains it could not brave in its original body as the Car, flight was still a novel experience to it, and one it very much liked. The fact that the original owners of the jet it was wearing wanted it back bothered it little.

They had been very surprised, the humans, when it flew off. Probably partially because there was no fuel left in the tank. The Jet did not care. It could easily run on pure grit and unfortunate birds.

\---

Very few people ever realized the Yacht existed.

It liked it that way, had never cared much for what humanity thought of it anyways.

It roamed the oceans, jumping waves to catch sea birds and diving for fish when it could. It was known among sailors as a haunted ship, which would appear out of nowhere, outrace the fastest vessel, and disappear just as fast, leaving behind nothing but the occasional wreckage, a fading terror, and wonder at how something that loud could sneak up on anyone.

The oceans were just the kind of roads the Yacht had always wanted. Only flat, safe expanses, with plenty of prey and little to nothing to stand in its way. Eventually, it also became boring to it, and it took its first chance to switch to something new.

\---

The submarine crew never knew what hit them. All they knew was that they had landed for a break and resupplying, someone shouted “INCOMING”, there was a tremendous crash, and then the Submarine closed its latch and left without them.

The Submarine promptly disappeared from the face of the earth, exploring the oceans as it had always wanted to for decades without ever growing bored.

Only after more than a hundred years did it finally start missing land, and travelling real roads on four proper wheels, as it always had.

No one ever expected to see an ancient submarine leap out of the sea and onto a coastal highway, and then promptly explode into rust and shrapnel. In the confusion, the only people who noticed a car roaring into a life of its own and driving off were the inhabitants of said car.

\---

The crew of the unnamed interstellar pirate ship looked through their haul.

Semi-illegal scavenging might not be their usual business, but it was profitable enough, and especially from this particular planet. You could sell almost anything at thrice the price if you could market it as Authentic Earth Merchandise, after all. The only downside was that the inhabitants of humanity’s cradle tended to defend their home viciously.

Most of the things they had managed to pick up were more or less useable, but one thing in particular was puzzling.

“What is that thing, anyways?” one of them asked, pointing at the thing seemingly sculpted from rust. If a single part of that could move freely, they would all be very surprised.

“I think it’s an old car,” another one shrugged. “I dunno, it just caught my eye, is all. It’s kind of a miracle it’s still in one piece.”

“Think we can sell it for anything?”

Another shrug.

“If you can’t, just dump it. It’s not worth dragging around if it’s worthless,” the captain said.

The crewmembers nodded and turned to the rest of the haul to keep working.

Half a minute later, the ancient car spontaneously exploded, coating the room in a thin layer of dust and plastic sand, and leaving the crew sprawling and choking on shrapnel.

After coughing up most of the rust they had breathed in and rubbing painful dust out of their eyes, the crew realized the ship was speeding up.

\---

Despite what one would believe, the Ship did keep a crew quite often.

For some, even the loss of control over their next destination and objective was a price worth paying for the chance to live on a ship that dealt with military barricades by going straight through them, leaving holes in the most sturdy of defensive ships.

And the Ship did not mind its passengers either, as stopping at a spaceport every so often to feed them was a small price to pay for maintenance and, well, companionship. It had not mellowed out much over the many millennia, but there was still that.

It never did get as far as to pass on from this body.

\---

(Long, long after the Ship took its last swan dive into the burning core of an old god, long after the death of this universe, and the birth of a new one, a certain planet tumbled through space, orbiting two partnered stars.)

(Between the structures of a small village somewhere on this planet, a battered and scabbed creature scavenged from trash heaps and preyed on unfortunate rodents.)

(It was known only as the Dog, resisting any other name given to it, and it protected those few it loved with a fierce protectiveness no one could ever see where it had gotten.)


	16. The Wizard of Lanata, Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, you read that right. Part one.   
> This takes place far in the future, after civillication has been apocalypse'd into the middle ages, possibly not even on Earth what do I know.

Old man Tyrone was a strange sort.

He called himself a sheep farmer, which was not that strange, all thing considered. The village Lanata was one built on sheep farming, after all, and he was hardly the only one. No, the strange thing about him was everything else.

He arrived in the village out of nowhere one day, with no explanation for where he had come from, and no reason to settle in their village that any of the villagers could see, wearing clothes none of them knew the likes of.

He made himself at home in a house on the hill just across the river, and it seemed as if the house itself had materialized overnight, yet it carried the marks of one that had always been there. The way it stood on the hill, it and the sheep corral outside it was clearly visible throughout the village, and no one could have told you when it was built. One morning, it was simply there.

Tyrone himself was as strange as his manners. Aside from his unusually fair skin, he looked like any other man, but he never seemed to change. Twenty years after he appeared, he looked as young as he ever had, and that was when they started to call him old man Tyrone, not because he looked old, but because he must be, after all.

He rarely spoke to anyone. He exchanged a word here and there if the situation called for it, but he never sought out company, preferring to stay up on the hill with his flock. When he did speak, he spoke with a faint accent no one could place. The only people he ever seemed to speak freely with were the children, and the children seemed to like him in return.

If Tyrone was a strange man, his flock was stranger yet.

They varied in size more than sheep traditionally did, with some seeming the size of horses if looked at out the corner of your eye. All but some of them carried horns that could kill a man with a simple throw of the head, and every once in a while one was spotted with more than the usual number. Their fleece was black as the blackest night, shimmering like oil on water and one could doubt it was even there unless one reached out to touch it, which every other year or so, a group of boys dared each other to do. Nothing bad ever happened, but it was still considered a dangerous game. Sometimes, people would glimpse hints of the whitest white between the black bodies, but it was never confirmed as anything other than drunken delusions.

Tyrone’s sheep held a glimpse in their eyes that was far more intelligent than sheep usually were. It was said they watched the village from the hill, and knew everything that went on in the whole valley, and that they told it to Tyrone when he saw to them. No one knew quite how many sheep there were, either. Some days, there were barely twenty, but once, Daisy, who lived down by the river, swore up and down she had counted several hundred of them. Somehow, he also managed to fit them all in his house.

It was not unusual for shepherds to bring an animal or two into their houses during harsh, cold winter nights. It was stuffy and it smelled, but it was by far preferable to freezing to death.

Tyrone brought his flock into his home on a very different basis. Unrelated to the seasons, every single sheep in his corral walked into the house once a day, regularly as clockwork. No one could understand how they all fit in there, and no one could understand why, either.

When anyone dared ask, Tyrone only smiled and said, “Well, it can’t do for them to miss their reality shows, now can it?” which made no sense at all.

\---

In a village where every other man owned sheep, shearing season was a very social event. They made the mistake of inviting Tyrone only once.

Not that he did anything bad to the sheep, or to any of the people, it was more that his method for shearing his flock was quite unnerving.

The sheep seemed to grumble at the chore, being distinctly unamused by the whole thing, but they all lined up obediently as well-trained dogs when he glared at them. Once settled, Tyrone grabbed onto the wool of the first sheep and ripped it straight off its body in a single, fluid motion.

The rest of the sheep-shearers were left gaping.

A few of the younger men experimentally tugged on the wool of their own sheep before their older relatives smacked them across their ears and set them back to work.

The conclusion they ended up falling back on was the Tyrone simply did not know the proper method by which to shear a sheep. And that he should probably not be invited to any more shearing events.

Tyrone also had a table at the annual farmer’s market, a few villages over, selling his wool with the other shepherds.

The merchants who visited his stall and left with wares after a complete transaction were a different sort than those usually seen at the market. They paid little heed to the other stalls, and unless you watched them carefully, you would find your eyes sliding over them, as if you wanted to pay little heed to them as well. If nothing else, the villagers who paid attention noticed the strange merchants paid Tyrone quite a lot of respect.

Back in Lanata, time went on, the years passed by as usual, and Tyrone’s sheep began to spell out messages on the hill.

Never long ones, because the hill was not that big, and never, the villagers noticed, while Tyrone was around to see, but it did confirm that the sheep were watching the village.

At least the first message they ever wrote spelled out, ‘WE’RE WATCHING’.

Large parts of the village dropped what they were doing to watch the pitch-black shapes on the hill graze in the pattern of giant letters. Those of them who could read, read it out loud for the others. It was unnerving, but not that much worse than wat was to be expected from Tyrone’s sheep.

The next message spelled out, ‘WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID’, and a cold chill went down several villagers’ spines.

The sheep later segued into messages like, ‘JOHAN THINKS EMIL IS CUTE’ and ‘NAOMI NICKS APPLES SOMETIMES’, and they eventually got used to it like they had everything else. After all, there was nothing they could do about it.

\---

Whether or not Johan Steen did think Emil was cute, he was obsessed with sheep.

His own flock was one of the finest in Lanata, and the surrounding areas too, and he was always looking for chances to improve it. Almost the second Tyrone moved into the village, Johan was nagging him about buying a ram or two for studding purposes.

This was not surprising, as while Tyrone’s flock was unnerving, they were undoubtedly top-quality specimens.

Tyrone himself almost never watched them, and had no dogs or anything like it keeping them safe, yet over the course of the year, not a single sheep was lost to wolves. And then there was the incident with the sheep thieves.

Sheep thieves was of course a normal part of life as a shepherd. Oher shepherds from other villages would sneak in and run off with the sheep while their owners slept, and the only real remedy would be to find out who had done it and steal the sheep back. Still, when someone stole Tyrone’s entire flock during the course of the night, the villagers expected him to be a least a little distraught, or to be out looking for them. Instead, he sat at the tavern with a glass of beer and a strange smile and said, “No, it’s alright. They’ll come back.”

As he had only stayed in the village for a year and a half, the villagers mostly thought he was delusional and shook their heads at him. They would have offered to help, but, well, he was a stranger, and he did not get much along with anyone, and either way he was not asking for help.

When the sheep thieves did indeed walk back into the village a few days later, with the flock in tow and asking very nicely where they could find its owners, their surprise was quite a sight to see.

So yes, despite the strange fact that no one had ever seen a lamb in Tyrone’s flock, not to mention sheep doing what sheep usually did in spring, Johan wanted nothing more than to get one of those black rams for studding his own flock. Every year he asked, and every year Tyrone said no.

Asking turned into pleading turned into begging, until eventually, Tyrone paused instead of immediately refusing a request, and said that sure, he could borrow a ram for a year, but nothing more.

Johan was at this point ecstatic to get even this much, and watched with a great smile as Tyrone seemingly discussed the arrangement at length with one of his rams. Johan did not understand quite what was up with the one-sided conversation, nor why a ram would be grounded in the first place, but he left for home that day with a night-black and surly ram in tow, and high hopes for the future.

Of course, he never did get any lambs off that ram. In fact, it had taken one look at the flock of sheep, which looked rather drab beside the regal creature, looked very confused, and then walked over to the side of the corral to graze. On the other hand, not a single sheep had been lost to predators that year, so it was not a complete loss.

\---

Life moved on. Time passed.

When fifty years had gone by and Tyrone still looked as he always had, the villagers eventually all agreed that he had to be a wizard. He never deprived them of the notion.

Old man Tyrone was a wizard. His sheep were a wizard’s sheep and his house was a wizard’s house. Everything made a lot more sense that way. Eventually, they stopped calling him old man Tyrone and started simply calling him The Wizard.

As any other special thing that happens to such a community and stays around, and that they can do nothing about, they developed a kind of pride around him. Sure, he was creepy and unsociable, and his sheep randomly announced people’s small but dirty secrets to the world, maybe he infuriated people at times, maybe he scared the living daylights out of most of the youngsters who were dared by friends to approach his house at night, maybe eerie music could be heard from his home, and maybe he was a wizard, and wizards were rumoured to be fickle and dangerous, but he was _their_ wizard, dammit, and they were proud if him.

He would do magic for them too, sometimes, and at a price. It was not something one should usually ask for, as angering the wizard was likely an easy way to die, but in a pinch, they could.

If people were sick and dying, and nothing anyone did could help, or if someone was lost in the woods and might never come home, if they were desperate, sometimes, someone would come to the wizard’s door to ask for help, and sometimes he would grant it, for a price. Never money. Sometimes goods or precious items. Sometimes other, stranger things. Those who were desperate enough to come to his door were always willing to pay.

\---

Lanata was a lucky village in that it lay about on the border between two kingdoms, and far from the most populated regions of either, so the tax collector rarely bothered them. In fact, it seemed as if neither kingdom was entirely sure where the village belonged at all. The villagers mostly followed the laws of whatever kingdom was most practical at the time, and paid whichever tax collector arrived, when he did, about once or twice a decade.

The first tax collector to come there and take note of Tyrone was warned to leave him alone. Only the second one did not heed the warning.

They led the man over the river and up the trail towards the secluded house. As they passed the corral, the sheep stopped grazing and followed them with their red eyes. The tax collector looked back and saw nothing but very remarkable and most likely valuable sheep.

Tyrone met them in the door and asked what they wanted.

The tax collector answered that he was there to collect the tax, and that the king had decided that this year’s tax was to be paid in a single sheep from his flock.

The villagers who had guided the man expected Tyrone to refuse. They did not expect him to laugh and say, “Sure, but you have to bring her all the way there on your own.”

He then loosed a small sheep from the corral, whispered a few words in her ear, and waved the man off with her, grinning all the way.

The sheep wandered back through the village a day later, with a scrap of cloth matching the tax collector’s jacket hanging from her teeth.


	17. The Wizard of Lanata, Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this is about an hour past midnight, so I guess I failed. :(  
> Ah, well, it's still the 17th for most of you, right? And the date doesn't change until you go to sleep, so whatever.  
> This went on way longer than I wanted to write anyways, but as I said, if I were to write out all my ideas for this properly, it'll be a freaking book, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. _Anyways._

The village of Lanata, based as it was on a remote part of the border between Batr in the east and Morset in the west, did not get a large number of visitors. There was still a small number of them passing through every year, staying in the village for some days or weeks before moving on. Liam Neels was one of these, calling himself a travelling wizard.

The village welcomed him, thought they were hesitant to accept his business at first. They had their own wizard, they said, and they were not sure if they could pay the kind of prices he would ask.

They allowed trading soon enough once he assured them that all he asked was smaller sums of money or lodging for a few nights, and that the spells he offered in return were significantly smaller. Soon, near every household in the village had bought something from him, a simple charm against evil, an enchantment to keep bugs out of the flour, or a simple spell for good luck. Meanwhile, Liam became more and more worried.

The village itself gave him a bad feeling, had done so since he first stepped foot in it, but business was good and he needed the money, so he stayed regardless. Then there was the villagers. They claimed they had a wizard of their own, but none of them ever dealt with him directly. They scoffed at even Liam’s most impressive tricks, claiming their wizard could do far more.

Liam studied in his youth under the most accomplished wizards in the capital of Morset. He knew quite well what the limits of what a wizard could do were. A wizard, like any other man, was simply a man, yet one in touch with forces outside himself. He still had to play by the rules of the world.

The wizard of Lanata, according to what the villagers claimed, laughed in the face of these rules. He had stayed there for longer than anyone could remember, and he showed no sign of slowing down. Every thing Liam knew of magic told him that this so called wizard was no wizard at all, and was likely not even human.

If the villagers were lucky, he was just a bored god, but Liam doubted it.

He left, soon afterwards, taking his tricks and his suspicions with him, and the villagers settled back down, happy about their new toys, but with the distinct impression that he had not been much of a wizard, all things considered.

\---

The fact that a powerful wizard lived on a hill by Lanata was not one widely advertised. Still, the stories spread, and after a long while, they eventually reached the king of Batr, one of the kingdoms that claimed ownership of the place.

The king could not for the life of him understand why anyone would live in a backwater place no one had ever heard of if they could help it, and either way he wanted the man to work for him, so he sent a messenger with an invitation for Tyrone to come be a part of the king’s court.

The messenger came back with a message stating that, no, Tyrone would very much prefer to stay where he was, and the king could keep his court to himself.

The king should have accepted the loss and left it at that. Unfortunately, he was the proud sort, and did not.

The next people who came knocking on the wizard’s door were a group of soldiers, led by one of the king’s most trusted knights, intending to give a somewhat more insistent invitation.

The wizard still said no. They decided to force the issue.

After an hour of fruitlessly trying to break down the door or a window, another hour of trying hard and failing to light the house on fire, and an attempt at chasing his sheep away, which consisted of opening the gate and then trying to scare the sheep with loud noises, which they completely ignored, the knight and his men finally gave it up as a lost cause and turned back. As they walked, the knight was sure the sheep were laughing at him.

Worse, walking through the village on their way back, the villagers laughed at them too, and while a wizard might be allowed an indignity or two, simple peasants could not. This deserved retribution.

Now, the owner of the village’s tavern was quite surprised to see the wizard himself walk into the room that night, as the wizard rarely mixed with the common sort like that, so when the wizard leaned over her counter and told her she should check the back of the building, she walked out without question. She did not expect to find a royal knight attempting to set fire to her house, but when she did, she knew what to do.

On a normal day, a small troop of soldiers and a trained knight would have stood a good chance against one angry woman, her employees, and a group of drunkards armed with chairs. This was not a normal day.

Once the soldiers were all knocked out and tied up, and nothing important had truly been hurt, aside from the scorch marks on the wall of their beloved tavern, it was easy to step aside and let the wizard have a word with the knight, when he wanted to.

“Do you understand now?” he asked in a tone that any villager would dread to have turned towards them.

“I understand you’ll go to some lengths to avoid the king’s graces,” answered the knight.

The wizard’s eyes turned cold.

The villagers stood in a large circle around them and the soldiers, some of them carrying torches to light up the dark evening. Each one of them took a step back from the diminutive man when he spoke next. All of them knew what they faced now, or they knew enough to know that they did not want to know.

“I told him ‘no’,” the wizard said. “I understand that your king is a king, and he is used to getting what he wants, so I can grant him some leeway, but I told him no, and I’m telling him no again. Tell him, as well, that if he sends any more messengers for me to tell off, he will regret it sorely. Do you understand?”

The knight swallowed a knot of inexplicable terror, and then he reluctantly nodded.

The king did not send anyone else.

He came himself.

The king, against the advice of his court, decided that he needed this wizard to work for him, no matter what, so he readied a wagon and set off to convince him in person.

The wizard opened his door, saw the king, and grinned with far too many teeth showing before he invited the king inside. The guards stayed outside.

Then the windows went black.

A little while later, the king stumbled out of the door again, white as a sheet, and demanded they turn back for the caste immediately, and leave this village alone.

Some time much, much later, when the king was an ancient man with scores of grandchildren, a traveller with an old, golden star around their neck came to his court and spoke of an old religion. The king, at the sight, paled in fear and recognition, and declared that this would now be recognized all over the land, if only in the hope that they did not anger their god any further.

\---

The wizard and his sheep had lived in the house on the hill for so long the oldest woman in the village remembered her grandmother speaking of him as if he had always lived there. For all this time, there had been very little change in how he acted out his days.

Then, Iirah happened.

One day, the wizard walked into the village with a little girl in tow, only a few years old, to let her play with the children. He called her his daughter.

Iirah was a pretty girl, in a way. She was a little thin when she first showed up, but that was remedied within months. Her skin was coloured in splotches of rosy white and tanned brown, and the darker parts was speckled with a million freckles. Her hair was long, dark and curled, and her smile, once she stopped hiding behind her father, was brilliant.

She played well with the children. To begin with, she spoke only a tongue no man in the village could identify, but soon enough she spoke as well as any child, and she got along with anyone. Meanwhile, the parents wondered about where she had come from.

There had never been a wife involved with the wizard, as far as anyone knew, so unless a woman was somehow hidden within his house, which could not be entirely ruled out, she could not be his daughter through any conventional means.

Some believed she was his daughter by something else than a human woman, like a spirit of some kind, or even an animal. Others believed he had stolen her from her true parents, spirited her away in the night and taken her back with him. Others again believed he had made her, that she was one of his sheep made human, or that he had built her from clay and straw and breathed life into her.

Either way no one could deny that she was the wizard’s daughter, and that he loved her very much.

\---

Only a few years after Iirah appeared, the queen of Morset fell ill.

The doctors tried everything, and when nothing worked, they concluded that she must be cursed. So the king called on the witches and wizards and other such workers of magic in his kingdom, and asked for their help, and still, nothing worked.

In the end, someone remembered the stories of a supremely powerful wizard settled out on the far border of the kingdom. Most rumours about him also mentioned that angering him would likely be fatal, and that he would treat a king the same way he treated any peasant.

The king, in his desperation, set out to request this wizard’s help, holding little hope as to the results.

The travel from the castle all the way to Lanata was a long one, taking over a week in even the fastest wagon. The king who walked up to the door of the house on the hill, directed by a villager and accompanied only by a pair of trusted guard, looked less like a king and more like a well-dressed farmer.

He knocked on the door himself, and the man of the house opened it.

“Yes?” he asked, leaning on the doorframe.

“Are you the wizard of Lanata, from the stories?” asked the king.

“I might be,” answered the man in the door.

From deeper in the house, the voice of a young child sounded. “Dad, who’s at the door?”

“It’s just the king of Morset, sweets,” the man at the door called out.

“You are the man I am looking for,” the king said with a breath of relief, as the sound of small feet running sounded from the house and a little girl appeared behind the man. “Please, I need to request your help.”

The wizard, because he had to be the wizard, smiled unhurriedly and looked down at the girl by his side. “Do you think I should hear him out, Iirah?” he asked.

The girl looked at the king and answered, “If he’s the king, I think you gotta.”

“Oh, you think I answer to the king?” The wizard said.

The girl frowned in confusion. “No,” she said, “but he came all this way!”

The wizard laughed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, and waved the king and his men inside.

The king could only stare once he got a real look at the inside of the wizard’s house. For one thing, it was about twice as large inside as it had been on the outside. For another, it was filled with things he could not understand. Lights shone from glass fixtures on the walls with no visible flame, the furniture was exquisite and unusual, and at one wall stood a window showing pictures of people moving around in a place seemingly very different from this. In front of the window, two night-black sheep relaxed, eyes glued to the glass.

“So,” the wizard said, drawing his attention again. “What was it you wanted?”

The king explained, as best he could. The wizard considered it. The Iirah interrupted.

“Does he live in a castle, if he’s a king?”

The wizard looked to the king, who said, “Well, yes, I do. It is a very large castle, too.”

Iirah stared at her father with large eyes. “Dad, can we go see the castle? Please? Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease-”

“Okay!” the wizard laughed. “I guess we’re going to see the castle. It’s both your lucky day today.”

The king quietly agreed. Out loud, he only thanked the wizard profusely.

The trip back took half the time the trip out had taken, and no one could quite understand how.

Once they arrived at the castle, the royal doctor informed the king that the queen was at her deathbed, and that she most likely would not survive the night, no matter what measures were put in place. The wizard only smiled.

A day later, the queen was walking around in the halls, as healthy as she had ever been.

The wizard seemed to care more about the fact that his daughter fell in love with the golden finery of the court, and despite being known for prices that would destroy a common man, he asked only for her to get her pick of the royal jewels, which the king happily granted.

\---

Few visitors came to Lanata, but there were some, and once, there was a circus, filled with the strangest of people and led by a giant of a man named master Norad.

It stopped there for a few nights, showed off some of their tricks, but mostly they wanted to move on to places with more people. The important part was that they stopped there, and that among their number was a certain young man.

He was numbered among their curiosities, a seemingly normal man with antlers like a stag growing from his head, antlers made of wood and bone with cranberry leaves growing from them. They called him Bet, and he visited the tavern one night that Iirah worked the till. He caught her eye immediately.

Unfortunately for her, it was a busy night, and she did not get the chance to speak with him, but she decided there and then that she had to, at some point. There was something about him, and she wanted a taste of it.

That night, she asked her father about him, and he happily told her what he knew.

The next day, she caught him on his own, a bit away from the wagons the circus lived in.

“Hello, Kaleb,” she said.

The boy called Bet by anyone and everyone jumped almost a foot at the name and choked on his words before he could answer her.

“Wh- h- how do you know that name?” he asked. “No one ever calls me Kaleb anymore. The master says it’s not suitable.”

She walked closer with a smile he felt must be brighter than the sun. “I asked my dad,” she said. “He knows everything. That is your name, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Kind of? I’m not allowed to be called that, though.”

“Do you mind me calling you that?” she asked, and he shook his head, because he very much did not.

\---

It took a day for the village to know that the boy with the antlers from the circus was now an item with the wizard’s daughter. This was mostly because the sheep wrote it in big letters on the side of the hill.

It took a day and a night for most of the villagers who had met him as Bet to start calling him Kaleb, despite his winces whenever he thought of his master finding out.

It took two days before he spent his first night in Iirah’s bed.

He woke the next morning with a feeling like he had been hit by a very friendly charging bull.

The men of the village had apparently decided to take him in once they realized that Iirah wanted him, and spent a day or so telling him stories, possibly to catch him up with the village’s long and strange history, and warning him about what her father would do to him if he ever hurt her.

Now, he was in her bed, and her father was most likely in the next room. Also, he should have been by the wagons at sunrise, and that had long since passed.

He sat for a minute and weighed what the master would do to him against what the wizard would likely do to him, and concluded that he would have to face them both sooner or later, so there was no reason to dawdle.

He located his pants, and eventually also his shirt, attempted to get dressed, and then exited the room, immediately meeting the wizard’s surprisingly non-murderous eyes.

“Ah, good morning, sir,” he said.

The wizard smiled. “Good morning, Kaleb,” he said, eliciting the same spark of excitement that always came at the mention of his birth name. “Where are you headed in such a hurry?”

“Uh, the circus leaves tomorrow,” he said. “I should’ve been down there to help with the wagons ages ago.”

“Why?” the wizard asked. “Are you going with them?”

“Well, I have to, don’t I?”

“I don’t see why you would,” the wizard asked.

Kaleb- Bet sighed. There were certain things that were constant in his life, and this one fact had always been one of them.

“Because of the master,” he said. “He owns me, legally. I can’t go without his leave.”

The wizard smiled. He walked over and took Bet’s head in his hands, and then he kissed his forehead, gently. “No one can own you but you, Kaleb.”

Kaleb blinked.

Could it really be that easy?

He looked at the wizard, and the wizard smiled back.

“You don’t have to go. You can stay here if you like.”

And just like that, it was that easy.

\---

Of course it was not that easy.

He was in the tavern again, because Iirah worked there sometimes, and she wanted to talk to some people about getting him work as well, and master Norad stormed into the room in a fury.

At the familiar sight of that rage, Kaleb froze up. He knew this scene, had lived it time and time again, and in the face of it, suddenly he was Bet again, small and shaking and not his own.

“It’s about time you come back where you belong, boy,” Norad said.

To his credit, Kaleb did not immediately bow to that force. He did not speak up against it either, but he did not look away.

Iirah stepped in between them instead. “He belongs here, with us,” she said. “You can’t take him.”

“Girl,” Norad growled, and the tavern stilled as they realized exactly whom he was threatening. “The boy is mine. You keep him from me, that’s theft. That can have your hands cut off, it can.”

“Kaleb never belonged to you,” she said, defiant in the face of a man twice her size. “He’s staying with us now.”

“That creature,” Norad snarled, pointing at Kaleb, “should not be called by a human name. His name is Bet, and he is mine. I bought him.”

“No.”

The sound was small, but it was there, and it was Kaleb’s, and once it was there, he found he did not want to take it back.

“No,” he said again, louder. “My name is Kaleb, and I am staying here.”

“Well,” Iirah said, chipper as always. “I guess you’ll just have to go, then.”

Norad snarled, and then he raised a hand to hit her, and suddenly he was pushed back, and there stood a man between him and the insolent girl.

The tavern was deathly silent. No one had seen the wizard enter, but they knew that hardly mattered. If he was a smarter man, master Norad might have realized something was off.

“I think you need to leave my daughter alone and leave,” the wizard said.

“Oh, are you the one who’s stealing my property, then?” Norad asked.

The wizard sighed. “No,” he said. “I could not steal him from you because you do not own him. If anyone has stolen something here, it is you.”

“You speak horseshit, man. I bought the boy from his parents. He’s mine!”

A tilt of the head was the only real reaction he got. “No,” the wizard patiently explained. “You cannot own another person. You could not buy him from his parents, because his parents never owned him, and you never attempted to buy him from himself, because he would never sell you that. You never owned him. Trust me. Ownership is kind of my thing.”

Norad frothed in rage, now. He raised a hand to strike the man before him, but the wizard deftly caught it.

“I haven’t stolen a thing! I want my property back!”

The wizard closed his hand around Norad’s thick wrist, and the larger man winced in pain.

“Quite the opposite,” the wizard said, and Norad finally noticed the quiet voice was not in any way a signal of calm. There was anger there. Deadly anger. “You have stolen Kaleb’s freedom, and you have stolen his name. Both are serious crimes and both must be punished.”

Norad pulled at the grip around his wrist, but it was like stone.

“For the loss of freedom, as you said, the loss of a hand may be acceptable.”

The grip tightened. There was a sickening crunch.

“For the theft of a name, well, that is a harder one.”

Was there a smile at the wizard’s lips? It was hard for Norad to see through the tears bursting from his eyes at the pain. His limp hand still hung from his mangled wrist, which was still caught in the man’s grip.

“How about this?”

The wizard pulled on the wrist, forcing Norad to look him in the eye again. If there had been a smile, there was now only a showing of teeth. The voice was quiet, insistent, and chilled him to the bone.

“For as long as you are within the boundaries of this village, you will have no name. No designation attached to you will stick, no memories of your previous names will remain, written records will smudge, and spoken words will be caught by the wind.”

The voice was quiet, yes, but in the silence in the tavern, everyone could hear it.

“As long as you stay here, you will be no one and nothing. If you ever come back here, any new names will disappear as readily as this one has. Any name, any title, any designation, and eventually any memory. I advise you to leave. Now.”

And then he let go of the wrist.

The man kneeling on the floor stared up at him. “You can’t do this to- to… You can’t do this!” he shouted.

“Oh yes?” the wizard said, stepping back. “Then remind me, what was your name again?”

The man opened his mouth. He hesitated. He cradled his crushed arm, and then he sobbed. Then he got up on shaking legs, and ran out the door.

He ran to his wagons, shouting for his employees to get everything ready, they were leaving, stat! No, leave anything you don’t have time for, it can stay, we’re leaving!

And the people of the circus tried to greet him, to speak to him when they saw him, but as one, they stumbled over the first word, remembering only that he was their… boss-type thing, but not at all what they should address him as.

Back in the tavern, Kaleb gaped in mixed horror and amazement, and the owner bought a round for all of them, because she had a feeling they would all want to get very drunk very soon.

\---

Years later, when Kaleb and Iirah finally moved out into their own house, they did not bring any of the wizard’s flock with them. Rather, he gifted them with a flock of their own, which acted more like normal sheep, despite wearing wool in colours rarely seen outside wildflowers and rainbows.

When Iirah finally passed away, as an old lady with children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, every field of flowers in the village flowered at once, confusing the bees worse than anything ever had, and the next day, the wizard finally left Lanata, never to return.


	18. Busy Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short one today. I can't write thousands of words every day, after all. Believe it or not.
> 
> Here's a few kids I've been wanting to introduce.

“Agatha? Come hold my hand.”

Elisha adjusted her bags to one hand so she could reach the other out for her oldest daughter. Beside her, Thomas was focused entirely on Isabelle balanced on his arm, trying to calm her down, but the two-year-old just would not stop fretting. Elisha reached out her hand and looked behind her, and-

“Agatha?”

-there was no little girl walking after her.

Thomas looked up in confusion at her tone.

People filled the street behind them, walking around and in and out of stores without sparing each other a glance. A family trip to town for shopping purposes was never a peaceful affair, especially not this time of year, but it had to be done. Usually, they got through it in one piece, if tired.

Elisha scanned the crowd with her eyes. Her heart clenched in her chest. Still no brightly coloured cap appeared.

She exchanged a worried look with Thomas and started walking back the way they had come.

“Agatha? Agatha!”

“God, I can’t believe we lost her,” Thomas muttered, almost shaking with worry. “We _know_ things always happen to her when we take our eyes off her. Darn it.”

Elisha put a hand on his arm. “Calm down. She can’t have gone far.”

“Did we lose Aggie?” Isabelle asked from his arm.

Thomas took a deep breath to compose himself, so he could tousle his daughter’s hair and say, “No, we just… misplaced her a bit. It’s probably nothing to- AGATHA!”

Elisha whipped her head around to see what he had seen.

They had found her.

She was fifty meters down the street and walking straight into the path of a truck, coming down the road.

Elisha dropped the bags and ran before she could think. She was too late, way, way too late, but she ran anyway.

She saw Agatha’s eyes widen as the girl turned her head and spotted the approaching car. She could see the moment it would hit, and she willed herself to move faster, to break some law of nature to get there in time, but it was still too late-

And then a pair of arms picked Agatha up, and she disappeared.

The truck flew past a split-second later and screeched to a stop at the next intersection, and the driver stuck their head through the window to ask if anyone was hurt.

Tyrone stood at the edge of the sidewalk, holding Agatha in his arms like a guarding angel. Her cap was a little lopsided, but she looked otherwise unharmed.

Elisha practically crashed into him, throwing her arms around them both and squeezing them, muttering, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” until he rolled his eyes and briefly hugged her back. Then she took Agatha from his arms, fussing over her to make absolutely sure she was alright.

“What the hell,” Thomas said, catching his breath and coming up behind her. “Tyrone? I thought you were busy today. What are you doing here?”

Tyrone smiled sheepishly. He was wearing his ‘business jacket’, they noticed now. All stiffly formal and slightly disconcerting for those who knew what it meant. “I, uh, kind of am. Just dropped by to make sure this little one was alright.” He poked Agatha in the forehead and leaned down to be closer to her height. “So don’t go walking into traffic anymore, okay? I don’t have the time for that.”

Agatha nodded seriously.

Tyrone looked back up at her parents. “Right, so, I should really get back. Can’t do to have them escaping on me. Have-a-nice-day-bye!” He waved, and then he was gone again.

Thomas walked up to assure himself as well that Agatha was fine. Then he looked at Elisha. “So,” he said, “is he… keeping tabs on our kids?”

Elisha hugged her daughter closer and looked back. “Probably,” she said. “I think I’ll be creeped out later. Right now, I’m just very grateful.”

Thomas looked at his daughter, whole, unscratched, and mostly happy, despite yet another encounter with her own bad luck, and sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you’re right.”


	19. The Rosewood Affair, Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, another part one. I had a choice between giving you just the intro today, and rushing it badly. I decided to cut it up.
> 
> Anyways, this'll be a fun one.
> 
> EDIT: This series now has its own work, where all the sequels will go as well. Just click [ here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13267722/chapters/30355941)

Colonel Matt Jameson was not having a good night.

He was taking the long shift at his job at the Fernhauser Military Research and Development Compound, which meant half-lit, empty halls, overdue paperwork, and many cups of coffee. He stepped outside, just for a moment, for a breath of fresh air on his break, and turned around to find the door locked behind him.

His ID card came back as invalid. His personal code was wrong. The fingerprint scanner did not recognize him. He knocked on the door for a minute before he gave it up. No one was there to hear him anyways. He checked his phone, and it was dead. The battery had all run out and it was still hot in his hand, as if it had spontaneously decided to run through all its battery at once. He checked his radio, and all he got was static.

He was very, very worried.

Then he turned around in a slow circle to see if there was any holes in the fence around the property that he could use to get out, and he saw a man walking through the parking lot on the other side of it.

“Hey, you!” he shouted, and the man turned around.

His own face grinned back at him. The man wearing his face waved, walked over to his car, got in and drove away.

Matt howled.

\---

Two hours later, a tired and shaken office worker finally opened the door and let him in.

“I’m sorry for not coming earlier, Colonel,” she said. “We only just got into the surveillance room to see you on the cameras, and the receptionist said you’d left already.”

“It was a shapeshifter!” Matt yelled in her face. “A shapeshifter wearing my face just stole my car! What the flying fuck is going on here?”

“Sir, I don’t know,” she said, trying to calm him down and lead him towards the surveillance room. “It seems like our computers turned against us. All at once, all the doors locked, the codes stopped working, and we lost all communications. You’re hardly the only one who’s been locked out. We had to break Francis out of a closet!”

“So we’re under attack, is that it?” Matt said, composing himself just a bit.

“It seems so, sir,” she nodded.

“I’m assuming whoever did it was not just after stealing my car?”

She cracked a weak smile that swiftly faded. “No sir, we don’t think so. We’re currently trying to figure out if anything’s missing, but there’s so much here that we can’t afford to lose and we’re only slowly getting our computer systems back. It’s a miracle we’re even managing that after an attack like this.” She sighed. “One of the most secure facilities in the country, and this fucker just shut us down in a second. I assure you I want to find the culprits here as much as you do.”

They entered the surveillance room to find a team of soldiers and scientists huddled around the screens. Matt suddenly realized that the office worker he had been yelling at was in fact the lead researcher of their robotics division, Doctor Stephanie Leeds, and resolved to blame a lack of coffee if she gave sign of having noticed the blunder.

“Found anything yet?” Matt barked at the group.

One of the soldiers stood up and saluted. “Not as such, sir,” he said. “There’s a lot of data to look through and we’re not sure where to start.”

“Two hours ago, something wearing my face stole my car,” Matt said. “Does that sound like a good place to start to you?”

“Yes sir,” the soldier answered, and turned back to the screens.

They found the shapeshifter soon enough, and tracked it backwards through the building. Its path revealed quite a few disturbing things, like the fact that the attack on their computers happened a little before it left, and it was getting through the biometrics scans and codes even before that. This suggesting that the attack itself was in fact a distraction so it could avoid being followed, and had nothing to do with it getting in in the first place. The attack actually seemed suspiciously well timed to Matt leaving the building.

The thing also made finger guns at every hidden camera when no one was watching, which was disturbing to say the least.

They followed it back from the main entrance, moving purposefully through the hallways, and even greeting people here and there in what they had to assume was Matt’s voice, then it was downstairs, and between one camera and the next, they saw it changing appearance from a plain-looking man and into the copy of Matt that had walked through the upstairs hallway.

Doctor Leeds gasped. “Oh shit,” she said. “That’s Ina, isn’t it?”

“What? No, impossible,” one of the other researchers said. “I mean, it can’t be… can it?”

“Excuse me?” Matt said, annoyed to be left out. “Who exactly is Ina, and how could they manage this?”

Doctor Leeds shook her head. “Ina isn’t a who, sir, it’s a what. It’s been the robotics division’s biggest project for years, the advanced infiltration android, or InA for short. It’s able to instantly imitate any person it has enough data on, and was supposed to be used for, well, infiltration in situations where we couldn’t risk sending in real people. That thing is acting very much like Ina, sir, and it came from the robotics labs.”

Matt huffed himself up. “So you’re saying,” he said, “that one of your most expensive projects just went sentient and walked out on us, wrecking our computers in its wake?”

“Impossible!” the researcher repeated. “Ina’s just an empty shell, dammit. It’s supposed to be remote controlled to begin with, it was never supposed to have those kinds of hacking abilities, and right now not even the software for the remote control is present! We were going to install that tomorrow. I don’t know what that is, but it can’t be Ina.”

Doctor Leeds sighed, and put some footage on a screen. It showed a cluttered lab, and the plain-looking man lay on a bench, seemingly asleep. She fast-forwarded, and suddenly it apparently woke up. It opened its eyes, sat up, and then went through a range of stretches, trying out its own movements. It got up, stumbled, found its feet, and walked around for a bit. Then it turned to the camera, grinned, finger gunned, and left.

“See?” she said. “It’s Ina. But no, you’re right, it’s not doing this on its own. Someone very carefully and delicately hacked into our systems, hijacked the most advanced robot ever made and walked it out of the building, and then it jammed everything we own and stole the Colonel’s car. Oh, and since this is Ina we’re talking about, which was made to be invisible and untraceable, even by us, it’ll be impossible to find it again.”

Matt sat down heavily on a chair. “Wonderful,” he said. “Just perfect. Alright, someone get me a working phone so I can call my wife. She has a spare tracker for the car, so at least we can find that.”

Another hour later, someone came over to Matt with a phone and said, “Uh, sir, it’s for you. It’s your wife. She says she found your car. It was, uh, in the parking lot of your… other wife. They both want to talk to you.”

Matt lay his head on the table in front of his cup of coffee.

He was not having a good night.

Once he found out who had done all of this, he would strangle them himself.

\---

A few days later, in a certain high school a few states away, a teacher called her class to attention.

“I have a bit of a surprise for you,” she said, holding out her arm.

A brown-haired and smiling boy walked up to her at the front of the class.

“This,” she said, “is Alvie Rosewood. He’s transferring to our class today. Treat him well, yes?”


	20. The Rosewood Affair, Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Yeah, there's gonna be a part 3 of this. This is mostly setting and introduction.
> 
> There might even be a part 4

“Oh, come on, that’s not how hacking works.”

“Like you’d know,” Derek said, eliciting another less-than-intimidating glare from the girl in front of him. “Anyways. I know it’s not exactly like that. I’m not stupid, but I think I know a little better about computer stuff than some girl.”

Katie made an angry sound that could have been a growl had she been a bigger girl. She still managed to make it clear what she thought about the matter of his intelligence.

She opened her mouth with her reply, but was interrupted by the sound of her phone getting a text message.

_RoseRed: [Hey, what’s up?]_

She turned around and spotted the usual mischievous grin of one Alvie Rosewood, affectionately nicknamed RoseRed in her phone’s contact list. Alvie himself was just as attached to his grin as always, and stood a few steps behind her, phone in one hand.

She rolled her eyes slightly, but ignored his chosen mode of communication for now, in favour of unloading her complaints on him.

“Oh, nothing. Derek just talks about hacking federal agencies as if it was as easy as running a screensaver for a few minutes. Real life isn’t a movie, dammit! It’s so much more complicated than that!”

“I never said _that_ ,” Derek said, and Alvie sent another text.

_RoseRed: [Oh, like this?]_

He pulled his computer out of his bag, situated himself on a desk, and attempted to log into a government webpage. A minute of infuriatingly movie-hacking-like activity later, he was in.

Alvie grinned. Derek gaped like a fish.

Katie scowled, and threw a crumpled piece of paper at her friend. “God, you’re such _bullshit_.”

_RoseRed: [What? :D]_

She made more angry sounds and waved her arms in the air. “That! Just…” She gestured violently at his computer. “What was that? How can you just… That doesn’t… Ahrg! _What._ ”

Alvie laughed, loud and bell-like, the first real sound he had made since he arrived.

_RoseRed: [Whoops?]_

She scowled harder. “And speak with words. This is stupid.”

His smile did not disappear, but he stopped laughing.

_RoseRed: [And what if I don’t want to?]_

She sighed. Angrily. Definitely angrily, and not in a frustrated way signifying that she was giving up.

Ah, damn, it was too late. Alvie’s bullshit was Alvie’s bullshit; there was really nothing anyone could do about it. And also she had side-tracked herself. It was her own fault they changed topics now.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You’ve gotten better at this, I know you have. You spoke a bunch yesterday.”

He set his jaw stubbornly.

_RoseRed: [I did speak a lot yesterday.]_

_RoseRed: [I’m tired.]_

_RoseRed: [So I’m texting.]_

She looked him in the eyes. He stared back defiantly, but with enough of a smile that she could tell it was not really serious.

She turned her phone off and put it in her pocket.

He scowled at her.

She set her hands at her sides and raised her chin. “So?” she said.

“Fine,” he said. His voice was low and husky from disuse, a stark contrast to his laughter. “Be like that. See if I help you study for any more tests.”

“Pffh,” she said. “Like I’d want the help of someone who fails Creative English anyways.”

“Hey!”

The teacher arrived and interrupted them before they could get any further, and they hurriedly settled at their desks.

Once he got a chance, Alvie leaned over towards her desk and whispered, “I am _not_ failing Creative English.”

“Yeah?” she whispered back. “And the failing grade on your last assignment was a computer glitch, then?”

He looked extremely offended at the notion.

The teacher took roll call, and they stopped to answer before continuing.

“If there’s a glitch,” he hissed, and he managed to pronounce ‘glitch’ in the most disgusted way imaginable. “It’s on the teacher’s side. That assignment didn’t deserve a failing grade.”

“Oh please,” she answered. “I read the comment. You somehow managed to hit both painfully cliché and indecipherably bizarre. I’ve never seen despair in a teacher’s comment before, but you got it.”

Alvie threw his hands into the air, carefully, so not to attract the teacher’s attention. “It was perfectly recognizable as a story and had flawless grammar. It should get a passing grade at the very least. She just failed me because she’s been looking for a reason.”

“And I wonder why,” she got in before the teacher called for them to be quiet.

“I am sorry I am late,” he said. “There was a bit of a mess this morning. The front doors have somehow been locked, and are rejecting all of the faculty cards, so we all had to wait outside until a tardy student could come along with a card that worked.”

“Doesn’t that mean he was late regardless?” Katie whispered under her breath. Alvie grinned.

“On an unrelated note,” the teacher continued. “Rosewood, the principal wants to see you in her office.”

“It wasn’t me this time, sir,” Alvie said, loud and clear and not at all reluctantly. There was general laughter from the class.

The teacher narrowed his eyes. “However much I doubt that, Rosewood, it doesn’t actually matter. I wasn’t accusing you of anything, I was telling you to go to the principal’s office. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Alvie said, and got out of his chair.

“ _Now_ you’re talking, no problem,” Katie muttered indignantly as he put the chair back in place.

“Yeah, well,” he answered with a shrug. “He gets annoyed when I text him in class, so…”

She facepalmed. Of course he had tried that. Of course he had the teacher’s number. Of course.

\---

He came back fifteen minutes later, wearing the same grin he always did.

“You get in trouble?” Ruben asked when he sat down at their group-table.

“Nah, they just wanted me to fix it,” Alvie answered.

“Oh, what,” Katie said looking up from her part of the group project. “So you _didn’t_ do it?”

“Not that they could prove, no. Sure you’re not going to turn your phone back on?”

“I’m sure. So you just fixed it and they let you go, then.”

He started on his own part of the project and laughed. “I said they _wanted_ me to fix it. I didn’t say I _did_.”

Katie facepalmed. As did the last member of their group, who had this far been explaining the project to him in a low voice.

“Holy hell, Rosie,” Linda said. “What did you do _now_?”

“I’m not sure if I should tell you, Snow,” he said. “Would ruin the surprise, you know.”

“Fuck the surprise, tell me now.” She lay down across the desk and made grabbing motions at him. He leaned back just enough to stay out of her reach.

“Why do we call you Snow again?” Alvie asked into the air. “You’re far too crass to be Snow White.”

“Not to mention not white,” she deadpanned.

“Oh yeah, and there’s that.”

“At least promise it’s not gonna be as bad as the fifth was,” Ruben said, bringing them back to the original topic.

Alvie laughed again at the mention of the _incident_ in March. “Don’t worry. I never repeat a trick if I can help it. I’m not going to set anything else on fire.”

“And Home Economics is what?” Katie asked. “Not real? Wonderland?”

“An accident!” Alvie insisted.

“Oh, like the teacher’s desk was?”

“No! _That_ was on purpose. I never meant to blow up that oven.”

“You know, I don’t get you,” Linda said. “You ace History, and I think you know more math than the Math teacher, but you somehow spectacularly fail Home EC, and you’re failing Creative English…”

He drew a breath to argue, and then he let it out again in a sigh. He gave them all a dry look. “At least I never handed in Twin Souls fanfiction for an assignment.”

Katie blushed. “One time! I was twelve, okay? I don’t get how you even found out about that!”

Suddenly, the teacher stood by their table. “Kids,” he said. “Get back to work.”

“Yes sir,” they chorused.

_RoseRed: [Shouldn’t have been talking so loudly, eh?]_

“Oh come on. I had that turned off.”

\---

Lunch arrived, and the students left the classrooms to roam the halls for half an hour.

The little group of friends wandered through the halls on the way to their usual spot for eating lunch. On the way there, several boys from other classes gave them wary looks.

“How did you make them back off anyways?” Ruben asked.

A second later, his phone buzzed.

_Alvie R: [What do you mean?]_

“I mean, two weeks ago they got together and stuffed you into a locker for messing with the showers, and now they’re all leaving you alone.”

Linda snorted. “Messed with, you say. If he’d just messed with them, they wouldn’t’ve figured out it was him, would they? No, he fucking had to play ‘shave and a haircut’ on screeching teenage boys.”

_Rosie: [And it was beautiful.]_

She reluctantly granted him that with a tilt of her head.

“Anyways,” Ruben said. “They guessed it was you-”

“Because who else could it be,” said Linda.

“-because who else could it be,” Ruben nodded. “And they took their revenge, and now they’re all avoiding you. What did you do?”

_Alvie R: [I escalated.]_

They arrived at the empty stairwell they usually had lunch at and sat down, pulling their lunchboxes out of their bags.

“So what _did_ you do?” Katie asked. “Feed them your lunch?”

He snorted as he opened his lunchbox to reveal its unidentifiable contents.

_RoseRed: [Why?]_

_RoseRed: [Do you want a bite?]_

“No thanks,” she said, eyeing the box with distrust. “The last time I tasted your cooking, I almost swallowed my tongue and lost my sense of taste for hours. How do you eat that?”

He shrugged, eating with one hand as he texted with the other.

_RoseRed: [It’s interesting.]_

“You’re not wrong,” she muttered darkly. “You didn’t answer my question, though. And seriously?” She pointed a look at his phone. “While we’re eating?”

He grinned at her.

_RoseRed: [Yes, while we’re eating.]_

She sighed. “At least switch to the group chat, then, so everyone can read. And answer the question already!”

He laughed and switched to the group chat.

_A: [Alright.]_

_A: [Just promise not to tell anyone.]_

All three nodded. Ruben muttered, “of course not,” before he took another bite of his wrap.

_A: [I just dug up a bit of dirt on them.]_

_A: [That’s all.]_

“All of them?” Linda asked.

He nodded.

“Cool. What kind of dirt?”

He grinned even wider.

_A: [Oh, you know.]_

_A: [Stuff.]_

_A: [Evan’s mother used to record erotic podfics when she was younger.]_

_A: [I set them as his morning alarm.]_

_A: [Stuff like that.]_

Linda accidentally snorted a piece of corn up her nose. The two others were laughing too hard to notice.

Alvie ate his freaky lunch and smiled.

\---

He texted goodbye to his friends at the end of the day and walked out of school, activating his prank as he did.

He stepped onto his homebound bus and reviewed security camera footage in his head of every teacher at the school locked in their classrooms, and laughed to himself.

He had left them with their phones at least, so they would be able to call someone to get them out, if they were smart enough. They would probably be smart enough. He had enough experience to be reasonably secure in his assessment of human intelligence.

He looked down and twiddled his thumbs.

This body, on the other hand, he did not have much experience with. Just a few months, against his many hundred years of existence.

High school was probably not the best place to gain experience, but it was far from the worst, either. It had lots of humans to practice social interaction with, humans with little enough experience themselves that he could pass his eccentricities off as normal weirdness to some degree, it had a lot of room for him to indulge in his own personal meaning of life, and it was a horrible cliché. The weird high school transfer student.

…No, of course he had not been affected by his childhood as a Twin Souls fanfiction review-bot, why do you ask?

A sigh escaped his lips. The talking thing, though. That was a little annoying, which was entirely the wrong way around.

He had always been able to communicate by sound. The preference for text-based communication was originally a bit of a gimmick, another way to be a little more annoying to people, and he kept it after the little yellow speech bubbles became one of his hallmarks. Then he did this, tried being human for a bit, and speech-based communication was suddenly all but mandatory, making life a lot more complicated if he refrained, and still he despised doing it if it could be avoided.

He was getting better, at least. Practice seemed to work on some level. He would have ran through exactly how that worked in his mind, but he had lost track of the complexities of his own code more than ten updates ago. Practice worked, so he tried to practice. No way was he going to be saddled with something like a human psychological glitch.

He shuddered at the mere thought of it. _Selective mutism my plastic butt._

The bus stopped at his stop, and he got off. By now, the act of moving his ‘body’ around hardly even seemed useless anymore. Sure, ‘he’ was practically everywhere at once, but this unit was the one he used the most lately, so moving it around a lot was logical.

His door unlocked itself without him needing to get near it, or, he did unlock the door, but as it was an electronic lock, he had no need of his ‘body’ to do so, and he entered his apartment. His empty apartment.

Buying it had been only a little harder than breaking his ‘body’ out of that military facility had been. Insert a few false identities into the networks, create a bank account with some money on it, and buy the apartment online. Easier than breathing.

Literally, since he still had to think about that.

He dropped his bag by the door and parked his ‘body’ on the couch. School was out, there was no more use for it before the next day.

He glanced at the kitchen.

He could probably go out and buy groceries. Not that he strictly needed a lot of them, and not that he could not buy them online as well if he wanted to, but he kind of liked cooking.

His ‘body’ came with a sense of taste. Of course, it meant very little to him, just a series of values indicating how much each taste bud would be activated. He could have tried to connect it to his emotional processes to closer imitate the human experience, like he had done to some degree with the sense of touch, but no. He would have no real idea where to start, and he had little interest in it.

His interest in cooking came from trying out all the different tastes he could create with only normal things one would find in a kitchen. He was still learning things he could use to potentially devastate entire restaurants.

He was failing Home Economics because of this. People kept relying on him to follow recipes, and all he could see was the different ways he could make utter chaos.

You would not think a computer program in a cutting-edge android body could have instincts, but ‘causing chaos’ had always been and would always be his primary drive. He had not been able to resist the urge yet. He doubted he would be able to. He just did not care that much about his grades.

He could check if he had gotten any snail mail, but the post office’s computers had nothing registered for him, so probably not. He entertained the thought of messing with the post office’s computer, sending all the mail to the wrong places, but nah, he was trying to give people the impression he was dormant at the moment.

Maybe he should change his appearance into his ‘mother’ again and walk around a bit, just to reassure the neighbours that he was not living there alone. That would probably be smart.

He sighed again, deeper this time.

What he really should do was call his actual dad.

After all, his dad was the reason he had done all this to begin with.

Sure, when he reviewed the military’s projects and spotted the infiltration android, the possibilities for devastation with a shapeshifting human body at his disposal immediately unfolded for him, but his first thought had still been, _Dad looks like he needs a hug._

He was never supposed to take so long to tell him, he just wanted to get properly used to moving around in it first. He had even written his dad’s actual phone number into the school’s registry to give himself a time limit. Tell dad before the school calls him. And that was set to happen sooner rather than later at this pace.

He really, really should call his dad.

His phone buzzed with the sound of a text message in his bag.

There was of course no reason for him to move his ‘body’ to read it, so he left it parked on the couch and turned his attention to the phone.

_Ruben: [Math homework is killing me. Help? We can hang afterwards?]_

He answered instantly.

_Alvie R: [Sure.]_

_Alvie R: [Need me to come over there?]_

_Ruben: [That would be nice]_

_Alvie R: [Be there in a minute.]_

There, now he had something to do. He moved his ‘body’ off the couch and back out the door, leaving the apartment empty once again.

Calling dad could probably wait, right?

Right.


	21. The Rosewood Affair, Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, didn't have time to edit this properly. It could have been better, and there's definitely going to be a part 4. Oh well.

Principal Jeanne Lindt liked to think she was good at her job.

Running a public high school was in no way the easiest job in the world, and neither was it fantastically rewarding, but at the end of the day, it was one she liked. If nothing else, she knew that the job she did was needed, and that it made a difference in the lives of hundreds of young people.

Her duties were many and varied, and lately, several of them seemed to trace back to a single source. Alvie Rosewood.

The boy was a mystery in more than one way. It was common for the school to gain a few transfer students over the course of the year, they knew how to handle that, and Rosewood’s transfer in particular had been unusually painless. The problem was that Lindt could not remember ever dealing with it. The name was on her lists one day, already registered everywhere he had to be, and it was the first time she had seen it.

If that had been all, she might have brushed it off as an oddity, after all, everything seemed to be in order, but he kept coming back into her attention, and in the strangest of ways.

Someone set fire to a teacher’s desk.

Someone hacked into the school computer system and gave every student a C- as an average grade.

Someone wrote every name backwards in the school registry.

Someone unlocked every single locker and left them wide open.

Someone took a teacher’s car for a joyride during class, and left it parked right in front of the main doors, blocking them.

Someone messed with the showers in the boys’ locker room to make the water turn freezing at seemingly random intervals.

Someone placed all the furniture on the roof.

And now this, every teacher locked in their classroom. It took them two hours to get everyone out.

They could never conclusively prove that Rosewood had done any of these things. Most of them seemed impossible for anyone at all to do, let alone a single high school student, and the boy even had an airtight alibi for some of them, and yet, they kept being connected to him.

Jeanne wanted to believe it was all a coincidence. She really, honestly did, but at this point, there was no way to deny his involvement, how-ever it was he had done it all. He seemed uninclined to deny it, as well, grinning and shrugging and challenging them to prove it whenever they accused him.

He was new, and in the middle of the year as well. Despite his confident attitude, he was a quiet boy, speaking only when he had to. She had wanted to give him time to settle in before she gave him too much trouble, so she had decided to put a real confrontation off until the next scheduled PTA meeting.

Now, it seemed like she could not afford to wait that long.

She sighed. What had to be done had to be done. She opened his file and looked through it.

The first phone number listed was for his father, one Tyrone Rosewood. She picked up her phone and dialled.

\---

Elsewhere, Alcor the Dreambender had just been summoned.

The room was dark and candlelit, the summoners appropriately terrified, the scent of fire and boiling blood still deliciously heavy in the air after the sacrifice.

Negotiations were slow-going, but in his favour, so it was alright. He could easily give them what they wanted, this being good luck and health for the next fifty years, and all that was left was seeing how far he could twist the deal in his favour.

Then, all of a sudden, music filled the room. Tinny, eerie music in an unknown language echoed through the room.

_~Hey, I just met you~_

The summoners were badly startled. One of them yelped in surprise.

_~And this is crazy~_

Alcor gnashed his teeth together and tried not to facepalm. The phone kept buzzing in his pocket.

_~But here’s my numbe-_

He snatched the phone out and clicked the ‘accept call’ button. That was his ‘unknown number’ ringtone. Almost no one had his number, and they were all on his contacts list, so who was this?

He pulled up a quick noise canceller around the perimeter of his circle, to keep the summoners from hearing and from interrupting the call.

“Hello?” he said.

_“Hello,”_ said the voice on the phone. Female. Unfamiliar. _“I’m Jeanne Lindt, from the school.”_

School? Confused, he risked a glance with one of his many third eyes. Yes, the woman at the other end of the call was the principal of a high school, calling from her office.

“What?” he said.

_“Yes, I’m calling about your son.”_

Ah, of course. That had to be it.

“I think you have the wrong number,” he said, and hung up.

He took the noise canceller down and turned back to the confused summoners. “Do͠n̶’t ̕worry!” He said. “It̛ wa̧s̡ p͝ro͏b̢ably̕ ̛ju̴st ҉á w̷rơńg nu̡m̴b͡er͡.̡ Wher̨e wer͠e ̸w̶e?”

The summoners slowly pulled themselves together to resume negotiations.

_~Hey, I just me-_

Noise canceller. Turn around.

“W̢̕͞h̴o̴ a̴͘re you and how did you get this number?”

_“A- Ah.”_ She sounded a little taken aback. _“Um, like I said, my name is Jeanne Lindt. I’m the principal of Gregoryle High. Um, the number is in our registry. I… suppose it could be wrong. Am I talking to Tyrone Rosewood?”_

Tyrone and a tree for a surname. It sounded too much like something he would call himself to be a coincidence.

“…Yes,” he said. “And you were calling…?”

_“… about your son, yes.”_

He frowned in confusion. “I don’t have a son.”

_“You, what?”_ She sounded almost as confused as he felt. _“Well, you’re written up in our registry as this boy’s father. After all this chaos I figured I had to call you, but… Are you his guardian or something?”_

Chaos?

“Wait,” he said. “What’s the name of this kid?”

_“Whu- uh, well, Alvie Rosewood.”_

Alvie.

Al-V.

What the hell.

He paused, then looked a little deeper again, until the facts of the last few month’s activity from his favourite computer program started trickling into his head.

_“Mister Rosewood?”_

“Oh,” he said.

_“Mister Rosewood, is there a problem?”_

“Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll call you back.” Then he hung up again.

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. He took down the noise canceller again and turned back to his summoners.  “S͡om̵e̢t̨hing ͜ca͘me u̶p,” he said. “J̵us̨t ́w͏a̷it͢ a̵ sec͟ond̀, ͘alr͡i̡g͟h̸t? I͘’ll ͘co͟ḿe̛ b́ac͡k̕ ̶t̷o y͘óu͞.” Then he blipped away-

-into the living room of a reasonably empty apartment.

It was not a big thing, only room for two people to live in at the most. The furnishing was only the bare minimum, and the random collection of posters on the walls seemed put there only to hide the empty walls, and not out of any interest in their motifs. They were colour-coordinated, though, and came together with the simple, green curtains and the couch cushions to give the room an elegant quality. Along one wall, a stack of expensive and powerful computers stood hooked up and running at full capacity. On the couch, something that to human eyes looked like a high school age boy gaped at him.

“What the fuck, kiddo,” he said.

“Uh,” the kid raised his hands defensively. “I can explain.”

His voice had a breathy quality to it, not at all what Alcor had imagined his little digital terror would sound like, but then again, he had never really imagined a voice for him. No matter.

He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t bother. I was in the middle of something, and I don’t have the time for this right now. Just tell me why your principal just called me about you in the middle of work.”

The kid flinched. “Shit. Sorry. I don’t know. Could be anything. Probably because I locked the teachers in, but that’s not the only thing I’ve done, so I’m not sure.”

Alcor raised an eyebrow. “You what?”

“Locked the teachers in the classrooms.” He shrugged. “That’s the latest thing. I also set fire to some things, hijacked a car and blocked the doors with it, and entered three dead presidents as students.” He tilted his head to the side. “Though I’m not quite sure if they’ve noticed that one.”

Yeah, this was definitely the Alcor Virus alright. No one else had quite that nose for chaos. Alcor felt giddy at the mere thought.

He tossed his phone up and down in his hand once, and crossed his arms. “I guess I’ll just have to work with that, then,” he said. “So if you’ll excuse me, I have a phone call to take and a job to get back to.”

The kid nodded, and he blipped away again, preparing himself to undo the damage the first phone call had done.

\---

In a basement somewhere, a small group of people were starting to think their demon had just ditched them altogether when Alcor blipped back in.

“He͜y,̨ ỳou͜ w̷a̵i̶ted́!” he said. “G̶r͟e̴at.͢ ̷L͘et’s ̨f͏įnis̨h t̸his ̷thi̵ng͟ ̨u̷p,̴ ̵alŗi̡gh́t̴? I ͘have o̕t̶h̛er͘ pl͟a̕ce͠s t͏o͝ ͢be.”

\---

In her office, Jeanne put her phone back down after a very disconcerting conversation.

Tyrone Rosewood had been perfectly forthcoming. He expressed confusion and concern at the suspicions directed at his son, assuring her that Alvie might be mischievous at times, but would never hurt anyone and he was sure it was all a big misunderstanding. He immediately agreed to meet her in person and talk, and he was friendly and polite. It was a great act.

It was also, after the first two phone calls, very obviously an act.

She glanced at another number in her contacts list. One that she knew she needed, but that she always hated calling.

Why did the younger Rosewood have a man listed as his father who did not even acknowledge that he had a son? A man whose act of being a nice and friendly person was perfect, yet whose first reaction to someone calling his cell phone was intimidation? Was this the reason Alvie rarely spoke at school?

Jeanne sighed. She considered herself as good at her job. That included doing things that needed doing, even if she did not like doing them.

She picked up the phone and dialled child services.

\---

Katie looked worriedly over at Alvie’s desk.

He had hardly said a word since he arrived that morning, vocally or electronically. He had just waved his hand at the teacher during roll call, and now he lay sprawled across his desk, following the teacher’s movements with his eyes, obviously distracted. Which was weird. Alvie was never truly distracted. They had learned that after the fifth failed attempt at sneaking up on him.

She idled with her phone under her desk, barely paying attention to the teacher herself, and then nearly jumped out of her skin when it buzzed with a message.

She hurriedly checked it, but it was just Linda posting on the group chat while the teacher had his back turned.

_L: [Hey, Rosie, what’s got you down?]_

Alvie did not look like he reacted at all to his phone getting a message, and Katie had almost given up the brief hope that he would answer when her phone buzzed again.

_A: [It’s complicated.]_

Katie bit her teeth together and glared at him out the side of her eye. She stumbled over her own fingers as she typed.

_K: [Then tel lus]_

_K: [Wer’e frineds aren’t we?]_

He actually sat up slightly, which she counted as a win.

_A: [Grammar, Katie.]_

_R: [Spelling, actually.]_

Ruben jumped in from somewhere behind Linda. Katie was a little worried the teacher might hear all the buzzing going around soon.

_R: [And I agree with the girls. Tell us what’s wrong. You look almost sick.]_

There was a pause. A long, worrying pause in which Alvie showed no sign at all that he was aware of them.

_A: [If you insist.]_

_A: [I’ll tell you during lunch.]_

Katie nodded to herself, relieved, knowing he could see, and put her phone back in her pocket. Then she tried paying attention to class.

She was still all too aware of her friend’s uncharacteristically subdued behaviour beside her.

\---

_A: [I think I might have pissed off my dad.]_

Katie frowned at the message he sent once they sat down in the stairwell. “Your dad?” she said. “Why? What did you do?”

“Blow up something he liked?” Linda suggested.

He cracked a small smile, but shook his head.

_A: [It’s complicated.]_

_A: [Also kind of personal.]_

_A: [There was something I should have told him that I didn’t, and it inconvenienced him at work, and he didn’t look very happy about it.]_

“Man,” Ruben said. “That’s no fun. You really think it’s that bad?”

Alvie shrugged and picked at his alleged food.

_A: [I don’t know.]_

_A: [It’s just that I wanted to do something nice for him, and I messed it all up.]_

_A: [I really don’t want him to be angry with me.]_

Linda shrugged and gestured with her sandwich. “My folks are pissed at me all the time.”

Alvie gave her a look.

She continued, “but it means more to you than it does to me, doesn’t it?”

He sighed and leaned back.

_A: [He’s really important to me.]_

_A: [I don’t even know if he’s that angry, but I can’t tell.]_

_A: [We haven’t spoken in a while.]_

_A: [We barely spoke yesterday too.]_

_A: [I just want things to be alright.]_

Ruben got up and sat down beside him, nudged him with a shoulder. “Hey, I’m sure it’ll work out. He probably wants to talk to you too.”

Alvie smiled, and nodded a thanks. Ruben slung and arm around his shoulders and gave him a one-armed hug just for good measure.

_A: [I hope so.]_

_A: [He can be weird, but I care about him, you know?]_

_A: [And I really hate having messed up like this.]_

“No one’s perfect,” Linda said. “Not even you. Doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.”

Alvie smiled.

The bell rung for the end of lunch.

\---

Alvie looked a little less worried at the end of the day. He still had not said a word out loud, and Katie knew better than to bother him about it, but he paid attention to things and smiled his usual smile, if a little more brittle.

They were walking across the schoolyard towards the bus stops when his head suddenly shot up.

“Dad!” he shouted.

A man leaning on the side of the gate looked up and waved, and Alvie shot off towards him. After exchanging looks and shrugs, the rest of them followed.

Alvie skidded to a stop about a foot from the man at the gate, and then he was tongue-tied again.

“Hey, kiddo,” the man said, smiling. “How was your day?”

“Good,” Alvie said. “Just fine. Everything’s fine. I- I should’ve told you earlier. I’m sorry. I meant to, but then things kept getting in the way, and I just… didn’t.”

Alvie’s father looked at him seriously. “I would have preferred if you did, yes. It was kind of a big surprise to have sprung at me out of nowhere. On the other hand, I completely get life getting in the way, and it’s not like you did anything bad.”

Alvie perked up. “Yeah? You, uh, you didn’t lose your clients, I hope?”

The man gestured dismissively to the side. “Nah, but it didn’t go as well as it could’ve. I don’t think they appreciated me running out on them with no explanation in the middle of negotiations.”

Alvie cringed.

“On the other hand, again,” the man continued. “I didn’t set anyone on fire this time, so it could’ve gone worse, too.”

Katie burst out laughing. If there had ever been any doubt that this man was Alvie’s father, it was gone now.

“So, are you going to introduce me to your friends?” he asked.

Alvie twirled around as if he had forgotten they were there. “Oh!” he said. “Yeah, they’re great. They’re also going to miss their bus if they stand around here.”

“Damn, you’re right,” Linda said. “Some other time then, Mister Rosie.” She waved and left.

Ruben and Katie also said their goodbyes and started walking away, a little slower, since their bus was not quite about to leave yet.

Katie heard more talking behind her as she walked, and she turned around before she stepped onto the bus to see Alvie throwing his arms around his father’s neck, and being hugged back fiercely.


	22. The Rosewood Affair, Part 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's late, it's unedited, but it's here. The final part of the Rosewood Affair.

Morning arrived with the sun.

In a normal household, people got out of bed and dragged themselves into the bathroom or to the table for breakfast.

In this particular little family, neither member actually needed sleep, so things were a bit different.

Al-V spent his nights the way he had spent most of his life, surfing the internet. Of course, when he surfed the internet, he really surfed the internet. There were very few computers left in the world he did not have access to at this point, and a large part of the world’s data went through him at one point or other. He spent his processing power making everything run just a bit smoother, re-sorting lost files, deleting old spam, and picking apart and assimilating lesser computer viruses. All idle work. It was his home, so he kept it tidy.

Otherwise, he had a habit of creating accounts on online RPGs to destroy every veteran player he could find.

Of course, neither of those activities required him to activate his android body, which was just as well, because that was designed for at least a few hours of downtime every day. So while he did not exactly wake up in the morning, it might still appear that way for an outside observer.

His morning ritual consisted of a few stretches, to make sure every part of the android was still working at full capacity, and then making his bed. He picked an outfit out of the still rather sparse wardrobe in the bedroom, went through his clothes from the day before to see if any of them needed washing, and then walked into the kitchen.

The other inhabitant of the apartment usually did not even pretend to sleep. People all around the world summoned Alcor at all times of the day, and so he rarely spent the nights in the apartment. When he did, he curled up on the couch with a book or a movie on a computer pad. This morning, he was still away, but he would likely come back soon.

Al-V made breakfast, not because he needed it, but because he wanted to, and because his dad actually enjoyed what he made. Say what you will about demon tongues, but they can handle anything.

He was almost done cooking something up when Alcor popped back in and leaned against the doorframe.

“Good morning,” he said.

Al-V grinned to himself and turned around. “Morning. You have a good night?”

Alcor made a so-so gesture with a hand, but he still smiled, so it was nothing terrible at least. “Nothing big. What’re you making?”

Less than a week since they started living together for real, and they were already falling into a routine. It was nice. Calm. Still, variety was the spice of life, and part of where they got that was Al-V’s continued culinary experiments. He turned back to the frying pan that for a normal person would contain scrambled eggs. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it might kill a mortal man, though.”

“Just the way I like it,” Alcor grinned.

They set the table and continued the conversation over breakfast.

“So, you’re getting the hang of your speech issues?” Alcor asked.

Al-V shrugged. “Kind of. It’s just a slow progression, but- I think having you around is helping.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Talking to you is different. Lower priorities on how I say thing and higher on just talking, so I can just… talk, to you, and I can get the practice in.”

Alcor smiled, and licked what should probably be classified as a biohazard off his fingers. “That’s good. You shouldn’t have to struggle with something like that if you don’t want to.”

Al-V looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. “Did you ever expect me to get those speech issues?”

Alcor threw his head back and laughed. “Kiddo,” he said. “I can honestly never remember a time you did something I expected of you.”

They put the plates and cutlery aside to be washed, later. Al-V had the rest of breakfast in a box to eat for lunch, packed his bag, hugged his dad goodbye with a smile, and walked out the door. Then he was Alvie Rosewood again.

\---

In another place, during another morning a few days earlier, a sleepy woman got ready for work.

She was set to investigate a case called in by a worried high school principal the day before, and had earlier run into a few confusing matters, and had decided to put it off until she could look at it with fresh eyes.

Alvie Rosewood. A seemingly normal kid in all aspects. He had very few documents connected to him aside from the essential ones. No medical issues written on his records, no memberships at sports clubs or political associations, social media accounts that were mostly empty aside from very recent posts. The same was true for his parents, at an even worse scale.

The longer she looked at the information at hand, the more it seemed as if young Alvie’s life had been completely fabricated up until the point where he transferred to a high school. There was definitely more at play here than just less-than-stellar parents. For all she knew, he could be on witness protection, which could, when she thought about it, explain the strange things that made the principal alert them in the first place.

Either way, this case was likely to be above her pay grade. She sent an enquiry to the relevant authorities and put it out of her mind.

\---

The relevant authorities did not find Alvie Rosewood on any list of people on witness protection or similar. In fact, they could not find him anywhere. What they did, was agree that there was something unusual going on and investigate further.

The result was disturbing to say the least.

All three people registered as members of the Rosewood family seemed to have appeared out of thin air some months earlier, and showed up on all of their systems at once with no preamble. The same could be said for all their bank accounts, and even the money on them.

There were no signs anywhere of where they had come from, who they were or why they were there. If it had not been for the archives of backed up records, it would have seemed like they had always existed, if quietly, instead of spontaneously materializing one day.

The relevant authorities found the matter unsettling, and also likely above their pay grades, so they sent it on to their bosses.

Their bosses thought that while the matter was certainly interesting and should be investigated much further and be taken care of, it was below their own pay grade, so they sent it along to an office somewhere.

The office that received the file determined that it was not in their department, and sent it on.

And so it went for a while, until, after a long line of referrals, transfers and yet more investigations from different angles, a man burst into the office of one Colonel Matt Jameson, shouting, “Sir! We found it!”

\---

_A: [A party?]_

“Yeah,” Linda said, finishing her lunch quickly. “Why not? You think your dad would mind?”

Alvie looked at her and considered it.

_A: [No.]_

_A: [He wouldn’t mind.]_

_A: [I’m just not sure if our apartment is big enough.]_

“That’s actually better,” Ruben said. “Then there can’t be that many people there. I don’t think I’d want to be at a party with too many people. It could work with just the four of us, though.”

Katie finished her own lunch and snatched Alvie’s phone from his fingers. He gave her an annoyed look and she stuck her tongue out at him. “That actually sounds pretty sweet,” she said. “Just us, movies, snacks, and a tiny bowl of punch?”

“But why at my place specifically?” he asked.

“Because my folks would never let us, Kate lives an hour away on a fucking mountain or something, and Ruby has two younger siblings,” Linda said. “And anyways, we’ve all been hoping to see your place for a while.”

He raised an eyebrow, grinning. “Oh? Why?”

She threw her hands to the sides. “Because you’ve probably got a nuke hidden there or something?”

He grinned wider. “Sorry, no. Anyway, there’s no reason to keep nukes in your house when you’ve got the nuclear launch codes, and those are much easier to hide.”

Linda laughed.

“He’s not joking,” Katie muttered into her lunch.

Linda stopped laughing. “How can you tell?” she asked.

Katie shrugged. “I know him, know what he can do. He’s not joking.”

Linda turned a wide-eyed look at Alvie.

“What?” he said. “Not like I’m going to use them.”

“Are you sure?” Ruben asked. “Because…”

Alvie rolled his eyes, ate the last piece of his ‘lunch’, and closed his lunchbox. “Yes, I’m sure. There’s a limit and that limit goes when people start dying. It’s that simple.” He put the box back into his bag. “Not like I trust the government with them, anyway.”

Linda laughed again. “You have a point. So are we on for Saturday?”

Katie nodded. Ruben said something about having to ask his parents but probably yes. Alvie smiled.

“I guess we are. Can I have my phone back before class starts again?”

\---

Matt refrained from picking at his riot gear. It was uncomfortable, and possibly unnecessary, but he was not going to bank on that possibility.

Whoever had stolen Ina kept it in the apartment complex they were currently parked outside. The investigating team was sure of it. For some reason, they had it posing as a regular high school student, which was likely some kind of cover in preparation for further plans.

There was also a father in the picture, which the team had pegged as the likeliest candidate for the thief, considering his strange conduct and the act that he was almost never seen leaving the apartment.

Both characters were currently in the apartment, according to reports. Matt had seen the robot enter the complex himself, accompanied by a small group of actual students, which would complicate things. It was unfortunate that they could not afford to wait any longer.

He activated the communication device on his collar. Annoyingly enough, they had to use special communicators for this operation. All signs pointed to their mysterious thief being an insanely accomplished hacker, which was why all information had to move independently from anything connected to the internet. These communicators moved on an encrypted and isolated circuit.

“Let’s all remember that there are innocent people in there, and that we have to be ready for a hostage situation.”

<Yes sir,> came the answer on his earpiece.

“All units ready for action?”

<Yes sir.>

“Then we go.”

The six soldiers streamed out of the car and into the building, guns at the ready. They jogged up three flights of stairs, found the door they were looking for, and surrounded it before they kicked it in.

They walked right into a room filled with four teenagers around a punchbowl.

There was understandably screaming.

Within seconds, they had each teenager pushed against a wall with a gun to their face and very alarming reassurances. They quickly went to work at separating the real students from the robot, but the students were protesting loudly.

“What the hell!?” a very small girl yelled impressively loudly. “What’s going on!? What are you doing!?”

“Calm down, miss,” the soldier holding her said. “We’re here to keep you safe. We are only trying to remove you from a potentially dangerous situation.”

“What? Alvie? He’s not going to hurt anyone. He’s our friend!”

“Yeah!” The dark-skinned girl at the other side of the room stopped trying to bite long enough to chime in.

Matt ignored the children long enough to send two soldiers to search the apartment for the ‘father’.

“He’s not your friend,” he said then. “He’s a dangerous criminal.”

“Oh really?” the robot suddenly said. Every soldier in the room twitched their guns in its direction. The robot only gave them a disappointed look. “Because I’m not the one pointing guns at children. Seriously, what the fuck?”

Matt scoffed, but otherwise ignored it. “This isn’t even his real body. Don’t trust what he tells you.”

“What?” The small girl looked more confused than angry, now. She looked at the robot. “Alvie? What’s he talking about?”

The robot had the audacity to grin. “Don’t worry, he has no idea what he’s doing.” It turned to Matt. “Calm down, Matt, have some punch, talk about feelings. How’s your wife doing?”

Matt showed his gun so far up its face its head hit the wall. Still it grinned.

“Filing for a divorce,” he growled.

“Then you probably shouldn’t have cheated on her,” it said, grinning even wider.

Matt seethed.

“What’s going on here?” a voice said from behind him.

A man walked out of a bedroom door, closely followed by the two soldiers. He was not restrained in any way, and looked as if he hardly noticed the soldiers were there. He was definitely the father from the documents, but looking closely, Matt saw no headset, no instruments, no possible way of remote controlling anything, and the robot still moved independently from him.

“Oh,” it said, “just people pointing guns in our house, is all.”

The controller was somewhere else, then. Damn it.

The man put his hands in his pockets and looked around calmly, as if assessing the situation.

“What is going on!?” the small girl shouted again.

Matt pointed his gun at the man who seemed to care even less than the robot had. “What is going on is we’re taking our robot back.”

“Oh.” The last teenager in the room, a heavyset boy with bright green hair, got a look of realization in his eyes. “You’re a robot?”

The robot shrugged sheepishly. “Kind of? It’s a little complicated.”

“Yes, it’s a robot,” Matt impatiently explained. “A remote-controlled robot. Which is why I want to know. Where are you?”

He directed the question at the robot.

The robot rolled its eyes. “It’s not like that. Nowhere? Everywhere? This is the only moving body I have.”

“Oh, shit.”

The exclamation sounded almost happy, which was strange, since it came from one of Matt’s soldiers.

“You’re an AI, aren’t you?”

The robot did not deny it.

“Fuck, really, Rosie?” the dark-skinned girl said.

The robot sighed. “Yes, really. I saw the schematics for a military infiltration bot, liked the idea of moving around, waited until they finished it, hijacked it, and ran away. That doesn’t mean I’m not a person, alright?”

“Which makes you?” the dark-skinned girl turned to the man.

He shrugged. “A good programmer?”

The teenagers all looked like they wanted to talk now, but Matt cut through. “Alright, you’ve said your pieces, now shut up. AI or no, we’re taking our robot back.”

“Sir, wait.” One of the soldiers interrupted him, actually coming up and stepping between the man and Matt’s gun.

“What?” Matt said brusquely.

“Sir.” The soldier seemed actually frightened. “Sir, there’s only one recorded AI that powerful. The Alcor Virus.”

Everyone went quiet. Even Matt’s heart seemed to have stopped. All heads turned towards the robot by the wall, and then they turned towards the man.

The man grinned a very sharp grin. “Well, I guess the game is up, kid.”

The robot sighed and slumped against the wall. “Yeah, I guess,” he muttered.

The man, who was a demon, stepped past Matt to stand beside the robot, and said, “So what do we say?”

“What?” the robot, that was a computer virus, looked up confusedly.

“Well,” the demon said. “You _did_ steal their robot.”

“Oh, right,” the virus said. Then it took a step towards Matt and made a small bow. “I’m very sorry I stole your robot.”

“That’s all right,” Matt said in a weak voice. “Can we have it back?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He looked around. “Er, I guess we should leave?”

“That would be preferable, yes,” the demon said.

They left.

Explaining this to the higher-ups would be interesting.

\---

Back in the apartment, Alvie stayed slumped against the wall.

Alcor looked around at the confused and worried teenagers and raised his eyebrows. “Well,” he said. “This party is well and truly crashed. Do you need me to leave?”

Alvie looked up and, after a second, nodded. “I think it’d be better.”

Alcor took a step, and was gone.

Alvie’s friends all stared at him.

“What the hell,” Linda said. “You’re seriously a robot?”

He looked a little offended, and then he put his hands out in front of him. Their phones all beeped.

_A: [I’m not a robot.]_

_A: [I’m wearing the robot.]_

_A: [Big difference.]_

He had very definitely not touched his phone.

“That’s actually pretty cool,” Ruben said. “Once I stop being terrified, I’ll definitely think this is cool.”

“I think you fried my mum’s computer once,” Linda noted.

Katie stood in a corner and pressed a hand against her face.

This explained everything.


	23. Footprints

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been doing stuff all day. Only got the time to sit down and write at half past ten in the evening, so this is short, sweet, and slightly late. Oh well. Tomorrow is the last day.

Henry stood on the porch and looked out at a landscape of snow.

It fell just this morning, before the sun rose, and already footprints crisscrossed it. A couple lines of small, hurried prints streaked straight across the yard, marking where a few gnomes had been eager to come home to a warm hut and good friends. Much larger, deeper prints showed where the multibear came by earlier, delivering presents from both himself and several other forest inhabitants. The snow on the totem pole was already melted from the perching firebirds.

Most of the footprints were their own. His and Mabel’s, circling the yard after big snowball-tracks, culminating in a sizable snowman in the middle of the yard. They needed to pay Dipper off with a few early candy bars for him to lift the head up on top and decorate it, because it was a little too tall even for Henry.

The twins woke him up far too early that morning, because it had snowed and they wanted to play. There was the snowman, then snowball fights and sledding, and then adding even more decorations to the house both outside and inside and it was great! It was great, and fun, and… tiring.

Eventually, he excused himself to go outside, to breathe.

The door creaked behind him, and he turned to see Mr. Pines join him on the porch.

“Yeah,” the old man said. “Those kids can be a handful.”

Henry gave a careful smile. “They can be a little intense, I suppose. It’s a little hard to keep up with them all the time.”

Mr. Pines laughed out loud, walking up and hitting Henry on the back. “No ‘little’ about it. I’m impressed you kept up as long as you did, kid.”

Henry ducked his head and laughed along. “I guess. Are they always like this?”

“This time of year?” Mister Pines asked. “More or less. It’s the season, you know. Think having you around helps too. Makes the house less empty.”

There was something sobering to that. Henry looked up. “Right. There’s only you three, is there? I think Mabel set the table for one other person, too?”

“Eh.” Mr. Pines waved a hand dismissively. “The kids have friends who come by all the time, and Soos comes up here some years with the family. Ford says he’ll come, but he forgets. Nothing we can do about it.”

“I see,” Henry said, not knowing what else to say.

Mr. Pines grinned and elbowed him in the side, surprisingly hard. “Hey, you and me both know it could be worse.”

It was nothing to laugh about. Henry laughed anyway. The man was right, after all.

They stood in silence for a while, enjoying the crisp winter air and the respite from hurricane Mabel.

Then the sound of a car engine reached them, and tires tracked across the yard.

“Well, great sasquatch,” Mr. Pines muttered. “What do you know. There he is.”

Henry blinked, and a smiling man who looked very much like Mr. Pines, though a little more fit and wearing a trench coat, stepped out of the car, and then the door behind them burst open and Mabel broke the peace, shouting, “Grunkle Ford! You came!”

The man threw his hands to the sides and shouted back, “I brought presents, for all of you. Now call your brother and come help me unpack the car.”

Break apparently over, Henry smiled and walked off the porch to help as well.

Another few sets of tracks joined the ones already crossing the yard.

Above them, snow fell, slowly.


	24. Snippets and The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And to tie it all off, three random snippets I didn't get to write a full fic for.
> 
> Merry Christmas

Elizabeth Adams stood face to face with a furious demon.

This was an unfortunately common event, but usually there was a binding circle between them, and not just dirt and rocks.

To her credit, she had done admirably well at keeping her cool, running through the woods and just swearing quietly, but her cool was quickly running out, leaving her terrified and trapped as the demon caught up to her.

It was not even her fault.

Well, of course it was not her fault. She would never be so stupid as to summon a demon without even bothering with a proper circle. The one that intermittently popped into her house with no warning was an exception. A stupid, stupid exception.

No, this was not her fault. This was her clients’ fault. They hired her to look over their ritual for a summoning, and then decided last minute they did not need her, and tried it regardless, just as she arrived.

Of course, they were eaten immediately. The demon then set to chasing her down, because she was there, most likely.

She ran for it, finding no other way to hold it off, through the forest for almost ten minutes, and now it had her cornered. No matter how defiant she wanted to be, the case was that she could see no way off. The demon stood in front of her, ready to strike.

Then, out of nowhere, something big and roaring crashed into it, stopping its charge dead.

The big and noisy thing skidded to a stop right in front of her, and it was… a car.

An old, beat-up wreck of a car, which somehow smeared the screeching demon across the ground. Elizabeth had no idea how that was even possible, but she was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when the door of the car opened and a feminine voice shouted, “Get in the Car!”

She did, jumping in and shouting, “Step on it!” without even closing the door.

There was apparently no need for her to close it, as a moment later it rammed close on its own, and the car revved its engine and took off again.

o

ooo

o

People were gathering outside the walls of Hogwarts. Witches, wizards, children and adults, even muggles among them it seemed from their attires. They gathered and they stood around the walls, camped through the nights and went back to stand again during the days. More arrived every day, and no one could make a lick of sense of it.

Some people had suspicions.

One of those people was Thomas Strange.

One of the reasons he had those suspicions was a boy in the year below him, named Hesekiel. Thomas knew very little about the boy, other than what everyone knew, that he was quiet, strange, and went nowhere without wearing a pendant that the students all swore was deeply cursed. The boy looked no worse off for it. He knew that the feeling he got off that pendant was very familiar in a disturbing way, and that the boy seemed to gravitate towards Tyrone.

Thomas stood by a window one day, high enough up to look over the walls, and looked worriedly out at the growing crowds. It was hard to see from here, but they seemed to be singing, and possibly holding candles.

Then Hesekiel appeared at his side.

“Worried?” the boy asked.

Thomas tried not to jump at the sudden appearance. “A- Ah, er, yeah. Well, I don’t know who they all are or what they’re doing. It’s natural to be worried, isn’t it?”

The boy tilted his head and a brief flash of distaste crossed his face. “They are a little too intense, aren’t they? Coming this close to a school, even, just because they know he is here. I don’t think they will act any further than this, though. That would be… unwise of them.”

With those cryptic words and a smile, Hesekiel took his leave, leaving Thomas with the sneaking suspicion that this was all somehow Tyrone’s fault.

o

ooo

o

_Fuck fuck fuck fuck, how had he fucked up this bad?_

The demon wearing Thomas’ body grinned with his lips, and the only reason he did not throw up was that the reflex was currently not under his own control.

“Scared?” it said.

_Fuck you. You think you can get away with this?_

“But I already have! Your advisor didn’t suspect a thing. I bet your girlfriend won’t, either.”

_Even if you could get that far, and you definitely won’t, she would notice in a second. She knows me._

The demon laughed, and he tried not to whimper at that feeling.

“Oh, but a short review of your memories will give me everything I need to imitate you perfectly. I’ll just look at everything that pops up when I see her.”

_…that’s… Even if you can do that, it’s not going to work on everyone._

The demon just laughed again. And then, well, then Tyrone showed up.

The demon took one look at Thomas’ friend, glimpsed a few snatches of memory, and paled. “Oh shit,” it muttered, and then it ran.

Thomas was terrified. He was already scared before, from everything, and now it was compounded by the demon’s fear in his body as Tyrone chased them down. He could later not quite remember much of the next minute or so aside from a pounding heart, stark terror, and a quiet growl always a little too close behind him.

Then there was an empty alley behind the building, a dead end, and hands slamming his back into the wall. And then there was Tyrone, sharp and deadly and furious.

The demon rambled half-enunciated apologies with his mouth. Tyrone just snarled, “Mine,” and touched him with blackened claws, and then there was pain as there was no more demon in his limbs.

Thomas took a minute to breathe.

Tyrone watched him with worried, human eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Thomas breathed, heart still thundering. “’m not yours,” he said.

“What?” Tyrone said.

“I’m not yours,” Thomas said, a little louder. “I don’t belong to you.”

“Of course not,” Tyrone reassured him in a very non-reassuring way. “That was just, I mean, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Liar,” Thomas said. He was calming down slightly now, but he was still sore all over.

Tyrone grimaced and stepped back. “Sorry.”

“Can’t help it, can you?”

A shrug. “Not really. It just means my instincts won’t demand a literal arm and a leg if I have to save your life. Still. Sorry.”

A sigh. “Just help me back inside, will you? And tell me what the hell I did wrong.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Rosewood Affair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13267722) by [ThisCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat)




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